Japanese characters on Android app

Hi, I've noticed that in the Android app, the japanese characters (kanji) are treated as chinese (hanzi)

I find strange that nobody mentioned about it before. Maybe there is an option I'm missing? or it's planed to fix it in the future?

Jori wrote:

japanese characters (kanji) are treated as chinese (hanzi)

Hi Jori, in what way? Definitions come from the Japanese dictionary, transliteration is romaji or you can show kana (hiragana/katakana). Are you perhaps talking about the parser or font?

Hi! yes, in the end, I think it may have to do with the font. I remember having the same problem in Anki, and I had to switch to a japanese font like Meiryo or Yu Gothic to solve it

But... is there an option to change font in the app? I don't see anything

This is an example of what I see

Ah, ok. This is not a Japanese vs Chinese, or traditional vs simplified, issue. As you stated, it's a font issue. These are alternate ways to write the characters, regardless of the language. I will ask the tech team to investigate, but I don't know if they will be able to fix it. For example, when I type the word しょうらい (future) on my phone, it displays as 将来 regardless of what app I'm in. I guess I've, unknowingly, memorized all the alternate forms. I wonder if it's a matter of changing a font on the phone.

Jori wrote:

Yes, from a computer perspective, I think it's only a matter of font. Some fonts sticks to one subset of characters, some fonts sticks to other. It would be nice to be able to switch that.

I've messaged the tech team to see if they have a solution. But I also did some digging - it seems this is a very common issue. I opened that same passage on my desktop and I see the "wrong" font. I think it is a browser or system font change, not something to change in our software, but I could be wrong. The problem is that if you change that font to Japanese, it will probably display "incorrectly" for Chinese.

I think it's the font that the app uses, because for example I have a japanese dictionary App named Takoboto, and it displays the characters like LanguageCrush browser. So it's the font of the app, I mean... if you do an app, you can choose what font utilize your app, right? you are not bound to the OS in that regard. Maybe there are apps out there that sets the font based on the language of the OS dynamically, and that may produce the impression that these apps don't control the font, but it's not the same

As you say, there is no right or wrong font. I suppose that people who study chinese would like to have fonts like Microsoft YaHei or SimSun, and people who study japanese would like to have Meiryo, Yu Gothic, Yu Mincho etc. I don't know the complete list of fonts, but for example some programs like Open Office or Photoshop have them grouped, like if they belong to same subset family or something

Look

you may be right...this is over my head

Jori wrote:

Hi, I've noticed that in the Android app, the japanese characters (kanji) are treated as chinese (hanzi)

Fixed - thanks for your patience!