I’m already on N3 but I still can’t read kanjis in different styles other than the ones in books, phone, computer, etc wich is a problem because I want to go to Japan one day and basically every store and restaurant has kanjis stylised that make it look pretty, but really complicated. 🙁
The other day I was watching some videos and there was a 花屋 (flower shop) that I took like ten minutes to recognise, and I felt so stupid beacuse it’s such an easy word :(. Does someone has any tips for that? If anyone lives in Japan, how did you learn to read them?
3 comments
I found a good way to be able to read bad hand written Kanjis is to write them myself, Because my font was way worse than the average bad hand written Kanji
I’m not sure if that would work for stylized Kanjis
I wouldn’t stress that much over it, I have problems reading calligraphy in my own language
Go to r/translator and look through the Japanese posts. About 40% of all incoming posts are Japanese. You’ll discover a diversity of fonts like nowhere else. Shop signs, advertisements, video game screens, knife inscriptions, old books, postcards, etc etc.
Well you can either practice reading and writing kanji in different scripts, or you can deepen your familiarity with the language. For example, even if you couldn’t read the kanji at first, you would recognize it’s 花屋 much more quickly just because it’s the only 2 kanji word to fit in the context of a store that sells flowers. Honestly, I would choose the latter, because knowing calligraphy is not that important of a skill.