Yesterday I spent a lot of time with one book, but when my language teacher had me read a passage from another book, I blanked because the kana looked completely different! I felt so silly, and it just hit home how much more I’ve still got to learn.
For those far more confident than I in reading, how long did it take you to be able to read equally quickly across various fonts without getting hung up on them?
7 comments
It does take a little while to get used to, if you’ve only ever learned Japanese in one font so far.
Luckily, there aren’t that many different variations. Once you have seen a few fonts in the major categories (gothic, mincho and semi-cursive), you have basically seen it all. Some of the kana have two alternate versions that are different enough to not be obvious (そりこさき), so you might have to look those up.
There will still be some ridiculous special fonts (sci-fi-themed, faux-ancient, etc) that are incredibly hard to read, but luckily you won’t run into them too often 🙂
(Also note that some kanji components, like 糸言心令, can also look different. It’s quite systematic though, so you don’t need to re-learn every kanji.)
Same thing here. To counteract this I started randomizing font-faces in anki. Including handwritten fonts helped particularly well.
[This](https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/) is my favorite drilling site for kana.
One of the many things you can customize with it is drilling in different fonts, precisely because this trips up so many people (me included). Might be worth a try (yes, I know, nobody wants to do drills for kana they’ve “already learned”, but it may be the most efficient way to train your eyes to recognize them in a different set of fonts).
yeah this is a known thing, this is why you change your font on anki every once in a while
handwriting will do this again to you later, but worse
JapanesePod101 has some really great videos on YouTube that show you the different fonts as it teaches you Hiragana/Katakana. They may also have one for Kanji but I haven’t gotten that far yet lol. I’m able to recognize Hiragana and most Katakana (still memorizing the Katakana) in any font thanks to those videos.
https://youtu.be/6p9Il_j0zjc
https://youtu.be/s6DKRgtVLGA
My first throw off ever is そ. Most of the time it the same, but some font like the one used in Kingdom Hearts game the first stroke look like the first in と and the rest is the same.
Beside that I guess I have a little trouble with the water radian 氵 、in some font. In stead of 2 down stroke and one up stroke, some font had the third up stroke become a long straight down ward stroke
Food packaging and movie posters can be ways to practice getting a feel of how glyphs can be stylized