You can increase the size of the font just for easier reading, but eventually you’ll be able to tell kanji apart once you learn more of them, it’s the same with small print English
You can zoom in, but honestly it might be time for a vision check. I didn’t realize I needed glasses until I was into my mid 20s and visiting Japan for the first time. While my brain could easily “fill in the details” for English signs, it couldn’t for Japanese (which makes sense). Got my vision checked, and yup, needed glasses for the first time in my life!
It’s normal. Kanji at small sizes in computer fonts don’t display all the strokes. Otherwise they’d look like blots of ink. As you get used to them, you can sort of make them out from their general shape.
Take, for example, 鑿. The first thing I notice are the 殳(ほこづくり) on the side and a 金(きん) at the bottom, and I can sort of make out the 臼 on the left.
When you become proficient at reading, you’ll be able to recognize kanji based on general shape and density, without seeing each individual stroke. Until then, you can try zooming in if you don’t recognize kanji in small font sizes.
For certain content, you could try changing the zoom, fonts, and fontsizes.
There are a lot of different screens sold for phones and screens. For example, higher-density screens might display the kanji in better detail. Bigger screens might help too. Generally, high quality branded screens are (really) expensive.
Some people find e-ink screens to be more comfortable to read. They are expensive and too slow for internet use. Highly-optioned screens have more layers so may be more fuzzy (e.g. light, touchscreen, wacom layer…).
MacOS is better than Windows computer for second language people studying character based languages, because of how the system either aligns fonts with the display elements, or retains shape regardless. It’s why Windows computers have always been better at displaying small text for native users: windows prioritizes aligning font elements on pixels which gives better character display while destroying shape; which is fine for 26 character alphabets but horrible with 4000 character alphabets.
Even though the diffference has become less noticeable in 2023 as both pixel count and system improvement have progressed, the difference is still there. 15 years ago it was silly how illegible Windows was for non-native readers.
Having kanji transform from a wide variety of meaningless scrawling to a precise set of defined radicals that I can read has been a very gratifying transformation over the last few months.
That said, when I’m doing Anki work, kanji is about half an inch tall. That’s for my own benefit of more easily seeing the radicals that form the kanji. But it’s been a pleasant surprise when I look at a book or text on a webpage with no scaling that I can still make out what I know.
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You can increase the size of the font just for easier reading, but eventually you’ll be able to tell kanji apart once you learn more of them, it’s the same with small print English
You can zoom in, but honestly it might be time for a vision check. I didn’t realize I needed glasses until I was into my mid 20s and visiting Japan for the first time. While my brain could easily “fill in the details” for English signs, it couldn’t for Japanese (which makes sense). Got my vision checked, and yup, needed glasses for the first time in my life!
It’s normal. Kanji at small sizes in computer fonts don’t display all the strokes. Otherwise they’d look like blots of ink. As you get used to them, you can sort of make them out from their general shape.
Take, for example, 鑿. The first thing I notice are the 殳(ほこづくり) on the side and a 金(きん) at the bottom, and I can sort of make out the 臼 on the left.
When you become proficient at reading, you’ll be able to recognize kanji based on general shape and density, without seeing each individual stroke. Until then, you can try zooming in if you don’t recognize kanji in small font sizes.
For certain content, you could try changing the zoom, fonts, and fontsizes.
There are a lot of different screens sold for phones and screens. For example, higher-density screens might display the kanji in better detail. Bigger screens might help too. Generally, high quality branded screens are (really) expensive.
Some people find e-ink screens to be more comfortable to read. They are expensive and too slow for internet use. Highly-optioned screens have more layers so may be more fuzzy (e.g. light, touchscreen, wacom layer…).
MacOS is better than Windows computer for second language people studying character based languages, because of how the system either aligns fonts with the display elements, or retains shape regardless. It’s why Windows computers have always been better at displaying small text for native users: windows prioritizes aligning font elements on pixels which gives better character display while destroying shape; which is fine for 26 character alphabets but horrible with 4000 character alphabets.
Even though the diffference has become less noticeable in 2023 as both pixel count and system improvement have progressed, the difference is still there. 15 years ago it was silly how illegible Windows was for non-native readers.
Having kanji transform from a wide variety of meaningless scrawling to a precise set of defined radicals that I can read has been a very gratifying transformation over the last few months.
That said, when I’m doing Anki work, kanji is about half an inch tall. That’s for my own benefit of more easily seeing the radicals that form the kanji. But it’s been a pleasant surprise when I look at a book or text on a webpage with no scaling that I can still make out what I know.