The kanji character in question is 心, or “kokoro”. However, in the certified, official, and revised list of 2136 kanji that I have in the Kanji in Context dictionary for foreign learners, I can only find a different character, which I cannot write here, but can be found in this video: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NCrw3ClOams](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NCrw3ClOams).
What is going on? Are there multiple ways to write the same kanji? Why doesn’t the more common variation that I’ve found not show up in my dictionary? Please help me clarify all this.
5 comments
There’s only one way to write any kanji, but like any other alphabet, handwriting and text fonts change how they look. Calligraphy is also highly stylised.
You can think of it as different font / style, but the strokes are the same.
You can see that here https://jisho.org/search/%E5%BF%83%20%23kanji on the “stroke order” section compared to the html text.
Can also see this when you image search for the kanji https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%BF%83+kanji&tbm=isch
In general many hand written versions of kanji are less blocky then their printed forms to a degree. Don’t worry too much about it for now, once you know one font you usually infer the other given enough context and practice. 心 just happens to have more variation than most.
That squished stylized version is also a radical.
悪 aku has that radical for heart at the bottom.
Don’t look for computer typefaces to tell you how to write characters.
We do the same thing in English with the letter a which is displayed on a computer completely different than it is written by anyone who learned to write in school.
Not sure what you’re asking without more information, but:
1) Some characters are written differently in Chinese and Japanese (different strike order), although they are the same.
2) In Japanese, some characters might have the same components, but the stroke other for one part might be reversed.
3) Calligraphic writing, depending on the style of calligraphy, is different than the standard script. Think of how you might write in cursive or in calligraphy in English versus your normal print.
4) There are type settings, inputs and fonts which may distort or change a character due to how the character needs to be rendered on a screen/for printing.