Chinese and Japanese characters are not shown properly on iOS

Question

I use Chinese, Korean and Japanese keyboards on my iPhone, but I found out that some of Chinese and Japanese characters are not shown properly. For example, when I tried to type in (せいしん or jingshen), the conversion candidate on the top of the keyboards showed 精神, not the correct Chinese characters.

I think the problem might be that I use Korean as the main language. But then is there any way to type in the correct word on Chinese and Japanese keyboards?

Answer 1

If you are talking about the form of the characters not being correct, so you are seeing the Korean character variants instead of the Chinese ones, these are in fact by default determined by which language is highest on the list in Settings > General > Language. You would have to make Chinese higher than Korean in that list to get the Chinese forms displayed.

Below are some images of those characters Japanese, Chinese, and Korean forms (Korean at the bottom).

While you may be seeing Korean forms on your device, people you send text to will see the forms dictated by the settings on their own machine. So a recipient of your email or text who is using a Chinese system will see the Chinese forms.

Of course if you are using an app where you can choose the font independently of the system, such as Pages, then you can make sure you choose a Chinese or Japanese font instead of a Korean one to get the forms you want.