Hi WK Community,
Years ago, before I started learning Japanese, I bought a t-shirt with a kanji on it. Independently, several people have told me that the kanji means something along the lines of “long life”.
Now that I am studying Japanese, I am struggling to recognise the kanji.
The closest I can find, in terms of meaning and appearance, is: https://www.wanikani.com/kanji/寿
Can anyone help!?
寿?
Where’s @Vanilla with that tool he made for reading calligraphy
EDIT:
Oh, actually didn’t read this before haha. Yeah, that would check out.
Looks like you’re right
First one is just 旧字体 of the one you sent which was the second option. You can see the bottom right reference is almost identical to the one OP sent.
Thanks for your help.
It’s crazy how the language can be so precise in regards to stroke number, stroke order, etc… and then the calligraphy is an artistic splodge 
Maybe is chinese. 
Possibly, but unlikely. The shirt says Made in Japan on the tag, and has the Ni and Hon kanji either side of a rising sun logo
yes, is difficult to see the kanji when is like this and i make confusion hhaha
True. It is surprisingly consistent with how different parts are simplified and there is a lot of nuance with the types of brush strokes, though. Experienced people tend to be very good at identifying them because they see a lot of consistency that goes right over our heads. It was such a daunting task I took the much easier route of learning how to architect, collect data for, and train my own convolutional neural network to do it for me though.
Yeah, there was a period where I saw so much seal script in the Reading Stylised Kanji thread that I could just about read seal script hands-free.
Trouble is, I didn’t keep practicing, so now I’ve forgotten it all again.
This is why practicing handwriting and getting your stroke order right matters. 
to be fair to jp calligraphy; look at fanciest level of english calligraphy. just as bonkers. or pre-1900s cursive hand written letters. even though I grew up with cursive in the 80s as a child; trying to parse very old cursive hurts my brain similar to jp calligraphy.
This app looks really cool and useful.
I searched around for it, but it looks like the online version is no longer functioning. 
Yeah I took it down to not have to bother with hosting/fees. I still can run it on local host though and use it anytime I want
