I was looking up the Kanji for 青 and of course Google translate showed romaji word “Shinjitai”, which left me a bit confused about the meaning, as shinjitai does not mean blue, but rather the characters “new form”.
How often would I see a kyujitai form? Would it be worth studying now as a beginner or are there words that are only written as Kyujitai form?
2 comments
Google Translate is pretty much worthless as a learning material. But as for 新字体 and 旧字体, you shouldn’t see 旧字体 all that often unless you stick to reading materials from before World War II or possibly novels that insist on 旧字体 for stylistic purposes.
Don’t worry about it to start with.
Why google translate showed you that for 青 is a complete mystery to me but currently there are preferred forms (not everything was simplified) and the vast majority of what you will see will use these. In some cases computers struggle to even display variants as in Unicode things have been standardised.
Now there are some older forms that have been kept, for example some names use specifically kyujitai forms. And when you come to handwriting/calligraphy you will see variants, but in a lot of cases it is obvious from context what is meant (same as messy handwriting in English is readable even if letters are a bit different than normal).
But I don’t see any benefit to a beginner in studying these, same as you don’t need to learn ゐ unless you’re reading material that uses it.