HomeLearn JapaneseWild theory: The reason why differentiating kanji is so difficult (for learners) is because they where originally written in much bigger, clearer font on paper. Whereas nowadays most of us view them as tiny symbols on our screens.
Wild theory: The reason why differentiating kanji is so difficult (for learners) is because they where originally written in much bigger, clearer font on paper. Whereas nowadays most of us view them as tiny symbols on our screens.
If you’ve ever held a physical book meant for native speakers (i.e., not a textbook pandering to learners), you’d know that Japanese books are pretty much always small even though the writing system would benefit greatly from larger book dimensions to accommodate a larger font. To get the same font size on a website, you’d have to set the scaling lower than 100%. The whole “Japanese books being small” thing also applies to manga. Typically, a standard Japanese edition will always be smaller than a standard English edition of the same manga.
[https://kana-quiz.tofugu.com/](https://kana-quiz.tofugu.com/) Just want to double check that the Kanji I’m memorising is the right ones, Sorry if this…
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Here’s some [Heian era handwriting](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/讃岐国司解.jpg) you can use to test your theory that it used to be “more clear”.
zoom in
If you’ve ever held a physical book meant for native speakers (i.e., not a textbook pandering to learners), you’d know that Japanese books are pretty much always small even though the writing system would benefit greatly from larger book dimensions to accommodate a larger font. To get the same font size on a website, you’d have to set the scaling lower than 100%. The whole “Japanese books being small” thing also applies to manga. Typically, a standard Japanese edition will always be smaller than a standard English edition of the same manga.