The story of a weird ass kanji
So while I was playing cave story in Japanese, I wrote down a lot of little gibberish notes in my old panda copy paper notebook (that I started in 2005...that’s 12 years ago, so 1st grade?). The goal was to translate these notes in to a vocab list.
I happened upon the weirdest looking thing: 孵
Yeah, you’re going to have to zoom in to see that. It also took some time, because despite how good Google Translate is at reading my Japanese handwriting, if I wrote it down initially so it looks like two words it’s not going to decipher what I’m saying. Eventually I was able to get this to pop out, with a 卵 on the left and something weird on the right. Searching it up got only results in Chinese, which is not good news for any Japanese learner.
Turns out there’s two cases: you’ve lost this kanji forever because it looks too similar to some Chinese one, or you have to dig a little deeper. Went to google.jp and searched it up, and ended up at Wikitionary, which is a great tool for cataloguing all these kanji, because there’s three languages where these damn ideographs are still being used.
Turns out, it’s 表外 (off the chart kanji), which mean its barely used in anything or there is a simplified version. It turns out to be the first; 孵 retains its use in the relatively modern game I played because of one term 孵化 (incubation), which is rare enough not to force the Japanese to simplify it and put it back on the chart, but common enough so that it’ll come out whenever someone wants to say “incubation”. I guess if you really want to avoid using a 表外 kanji which people like me won’t know, you can write ふ化.
From egg 卵 and phonetic (also meaning to hold and protect) 孚. Meaning to hatch. http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?submitButton1=Etymology&characterInput=%E5%AD%B5