[Improvement] Japanese font updated

#1

Hey folks - just a quick update that we’ve changed the font for all Japanese courses (and Japanese across the site) to use Noto Sans JP. This was initially because it’s the typeface we’re supposed to use within the Memrise brand, but from a personal pov, this is a more readable, less ornate representation of Hiragana and Katakana (for those who don’t know, the Noto family is a Google initiative where they’re trying to make an accessible, readable font for all the world’s languages. You can read more here.).

Let us know if there are any issues with the new font!

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Japanese Font Thicker and Harder to Read?
#2

I find the new font far less readable than the old one. The new characters are too dense, at a quick glance they blur together into just uniform blobs of black. With the old one there was enough negative space between the strokes to easily distinguish their shapes.

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#3

Thanks for the feedback. We’ll keep iterating. I think we can definitely play with the weight of the font to make it a bit clearer.

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#4

The new font is much harder to read and subtle differences for beginners are much harder to see. It also appears that everything is in bold, which is distracting. If you need to use this font maybe lose the bold and make it thinner?

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#5

The new font is much harder to read for me too, it looks like too bold. Can’t we go back to something similar to the previous one ?

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#6

I find the new font much harder to read, as the lines are thicker and subtle differences in kanji (such as close lines) blur together. I also am not a fan of the new forms of the hiragana for ‘sa,’ ‘chi,’ and ‘ri,’ It took me a moment to realize that ‘ri’ was missing and that it must be the new form that I didn’t recognize.

I vastly preferred the previous font, especially for readability.

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#7

The new font is fine but the thickness is too strong, it’s like a kind of pen ink job. Can you make it a bit thinner please?

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#8

I find the more complex kanji almost impossible to read with the new font. Please could you revert back to the old text?

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#9

I agree with the others.
I’m having a hard time seeing and recognizing the new font. :face_with_monocle:

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#10

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I’m just working on fixing this now. We definitely don’t want to go back to the old font, because it’s way too ornate and generally pretty bad for legibility. We also want to make sure we’re mirroring as closely as we can what we use in the iOS and Android apps to make sure the experience isn’t massively different when people switch between the two.

We’ve dropped the weight down and this is what it’s going to look like as soon as it’s approved and deployed :slight_smile:

image%20(4)

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#11

The type assist for the free typing exercises are still a tad hard to read on 100% zoom

sqbWACQ.png800×424

And the kanji in the multiple choice questions seem to have reverted back to the old font
https://i.imgur.com/iYOqFNd.png (new user, can only embed 1 picture)
Other then that, things are looking smooth, keep up the good work!

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#12

Thanks for this! Just put in a fix for the typing buttons and I think for the kanji. Just so I can test, what course is this that you screenshotted from?

#13

The boldness of the new font seems to have been reduced this week. (Whatever the technical term for that might be.) I like it.

#14

That’s my bad. I had the change in review and forgot to push it into the live website :see_no_evil:

#15

on both decks and memrise, the Japanese and Chinese fonts are hard to ready, too bulky, either to big or too small, and ugly (and given that “target/source font size” are often the wrong way round)

instead of making more pleasent a difficult task (learning such languages), you are making it harder