I have an Android phone, and when I ran into certain kanji like 誤る it or the 残 in 残業 it would display these as (I think) simplified Chinese characters instead of Kanji. If the right hand component in 残 looks like it has 2 horizontal strokes through it instead of 3 (which doesn’t count either the diagonal stroke or the little dash to the right) then you have the same problem I did. Or compare it to the picture here:
https://app.kanjialive.com/%E6%AE%8B
I think I finally fixed this for myself by going into settings / system / languages and adding Japanese as a language (which is totally different from adding Japanese input methods, I added the input methods 2 years ago). Perhaps this info will be useful for someone else too.
2 comments
Changing the system language to fix that is a method I can easily trace back to a comment [8 years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1ju178/android_phones_display_some_kanji_incorrectly/cbikf48/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) in this community, but maybe mods would think it’s worth staying?
Idk, I see “直 and 呉 renders weird pls help” posts once in a while, so its really a judgement call to say whether the content of this post is worth staying as a post.
This is great advice, but it never worked consistently for me. I put Japanese as my second language and everything seems wonderful, until a day or two afterwards when it’s not, and I’m seeing 言偏s with a 丶 on the top everywhere. The way I’ve found to fix it back that works consistently is to go to settings, reorder the languages, switch focus to the current website / app, go back to settings and put Japanese back on top, and come back to the website / app. This forces it to reload with the correct locale for CJK characters. Although I’ve since given up and now just keep my phone in Japanese when I want to study / immerse and switch it back to my native language when I’m out and want to be able to show stuff from my phone to people without the conversation getting derailed to “your phone is in Japanese?”
As I’m typing this I’m thinking maybe the reason your solution doesn’t work for me is that I actually have three languages set up: my native language, Japanese, and English. I’m gonna try with only two and see if it works. Edit: It did not.
EDIT2 a month later: **I think I’ve found a partial solution.** I’ll leave it here in case someone finds this via Google. When I see Chinese-locale characters in the Chrome app, I just close the app (from the “recent apps” menu or whatever it’s called, it’s where you can switch between apps etc.) and launch it again. It looks like when the page reloads it always goes back to Japanese.