So earlier i was playing a game and this 精神 showed up. But the radical for 神 looked different
So while i had an idea of what the kanji meant, it looked unfamiliar so I spent like 15 mins trying combinations of radicals to no avail, I couldnt find that exact kanji .
I guess my question is, why the difference in the radical and is this a common occurence?
Edit: i got the first kanji wronng oops
Yeah, many radicals and components have older versions. Often you’ll see those older versions in less common kanji, because the common ones will have been updated to the new version most of the time.
Choosing to use an old style of kanji is just an aesthetic thing. Sometimes people think they look cooler, or they just want to evoke a feeling of it being an older style, like with 國 instead of 国 or like 惡 instead of 悪.
I had to put on my glasses to see that this character was in fact, not a bunch of random scribbles inside a box.
Now with my glasses I can see something that resembles a shape inside of it.
Oh lord, I’m gonna need to use those zoom-in screens like old people to read japanese, or worse, a magnyfing glass to read printed japanese, aren’t I?
Oh I see, that makes so much sense thank you 
That kinda complicates things lol. I guess I will be looking out for that in the future.
How about 鬱 (the WK kanji with the most strokes)
Sometimes it’s kind of baffling how much they change kanji from the old versions. 広 is the updated version of 廣
I bet no one that wears glasses in China/Japan has a biological problem, it’s just easier to have a magnifying glass set up like glasses.
Like I can see myself starting to recognize those kanji as blobs of lines, and then being confused by them when I see them detailed lol Marky my words, that’s where I’m headed
Edit: Oh and it means depression lol how fitting
Hah. Funny you should mention that one specifically, because the use of 廣 in the second image in this post threw me for a bit of a loop.
Try these on for size: 鸞驪驫
I mean, you’ll probably never encounter them in the real world, but…
Those strokes are so dense, it looks like they’re carved into my phone screen. 
But it’s nice that at the core they don’t look complicated once you’ve studied many kanji.
Like 驪 is just 馬 and 麗, and 驫 is just 馬 x 3. You can memorize them in a glance.
Oh, I like that. All kanji need mnemonics like this.
I forget which book/manga it was, but something I was reading recently liked to use 摑む instead of 掴む. Really threw me for a loop the first few times before I got used to it.
I encountered that in KonoSuba
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