do people actually respect the nuances of 探す vs 捜す?


`**Part 1**`

I understand **探す** to be **to search for something (general)**

and **捜す** to be **to search for something lost**

But do people actually care about the difference in nuance when they use it?

I mean do people use them interchangeably like using **捜す** for searching
(general) and **探す** for searching for something lost?

`**Part 2**`

Do japanese school children learn the kanji 捜す first or 探す ?




Together with many other questions on this website tagged as 'homophonic-
kanji', this is a case where in ancient Japanese when there was no writing
system, there was no distinction among these words (i.e., they were a single
word), but Chinese had finer distinction, and when Chinese characters were
brought into Japanese, different Chinese characters came to be used to
describe the same Japanese word depending on the context to match the
distinction in Chinese. As a result, they came to be pronounced the same but
written differently, and even after thousands of years, in native Japanese
speaker's mind, it is often a subtle thing whether they are different words or
not. People actually often do have problems distinguishing these, and there
are dictionaries and software tools that assist you to distinguish them in
kana-kanji conversion.

Quite often, there is a character that is used generally, this case `探` as you
point out, which stands as the representative of the words in the group. The
character for a specific meaning can usually be replaced by a character of the
generic one, but not the other way around.

`探` is taught at the sixth grade. `捜` is taught at the seven grade or later.
In general, the kanji with the general usage is understood to be easier than
the ones with the specific meanings.




Together with many other questions on this website tagged as 'homophonic-
kanji', this is a case where in ancient Japanese when there was no writing
system, there was no distinction among these words (i.e., they were a single
word), but Chinese had finer distinction, and when Chinese characters were
brought into Japanese, different Chinese characters came to be used to
describe the same Japanese word depending on the context to match the
distinction in Chinese. As a result, they came to be pronounced the same but
written differently, and even after thousands of years, in native Japanese
speaker's mind, it is often a subtle thing whether they are different words or
not. People actually often do have problems distinguishing these, and there
are dictionaries and software tools that assist you to distinguish them in
kana-kanji conversion.

Quite often, there is a character that is used generally, this case `探` as you
point out, which stands as the representative of the words in the group. The
character for a specific meaning can usually be replaced by a character of the
generic one, but not the other way around.

`探` is taught at the sixth grade. `捜` is taught at the seven grade or later.
In general, the kanji with the general usage is understood to be easier than
the ones with the specific meanings.

