I am doing Remembering The Kanji courses created by iamwillow and Nukemarine. I’m already familiar with some of the kanji, and noticed that in a few instances the kanji in the course material was somewhat different than the kanji I knew for the keyword. (Same thing in icytwilight’s RTK course. Didn’t check mackrell’s.) I confirmed the differences with both my copy of the Heisig book and the two kanji dictionaries I use.
One of my dictionaries (NTC’s New Japanese-English Character Dictionary edited by Jack Halpern) also lists the Hanzi (Chinese) version of each kanji, and I realized that’s what I’ve been seeing that looks wrong to me. Most of the time, at least with the simpler kanji, the kanji and hanzi are identical, but occasionally they are not.
Two examples:
直 straightaway, as shown in the course material, eliminates the “fishhook” element, and the last stroke of the “eye” element is extended past the two vertical strokes.
灰 ashes, as shown in the course material, uses the “by one’s side” radical as the enclosure, instead of the “cliff” radical.
I mentioned the ashes discrepancy to iamwillow, and they checked and said it looked correct to them, so I wonder if the course creators are seeing a different font (Japanese), than we are seeing in the actual courses (possibly Hanzi?).
In any case, will Memrise correct this so that kanji displays instead of hanzi? Or should I try one of the userstyles.org tweaks?
Thank you, Tonbo, for answering my question and confirming that the userstyles tweak would fix my problem. I was already considering that as a solution, having seen it in an earlier topic about kana, but wasn’t sure if the fix would apply to kanji. The screenshot proved it!
I also wanted to bring this problem to the attention of the Memrise PTB and the course creators, because I assumed that they would want to correct the errors. Most people taking these courses aren’t going to know an incorrect kanji when they see one; they’re just going to learn the wrong thing. And for a learning site, that’s just, well, wrong. If Memrise isn’t going to do a fix, I suggest that the course creators put a link to userstyles in the course headers.
Neoncube, it was the same in Firefox and Safari. I don’t use IE. The description of one of the tweaks in Tonbo’s link, written in 2014, mentions the “default Chinese font”, so I suspect that’s the underlying problem here, and Memrise needs to change the default font for Japanese courses. I assume the course creators are using a Memrise template with default language fonts.