Japanese Text - Too Freaking Small... I can't be the only one who zooms in 150%+

I swear, Japanese text is way too small. I know there is nothing I can do about it, but please tell me I’m not the only person on the planet who is this blind.

Seriously, I have NHK News Easy cranked up to 150% and the website is giving me the screen door effect which is just as bad as being small.

Anybody else?

(Edit - Oh, and I’m on a 24" screen, just in case it gets asked)

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If it bothers you that much, maybe switching to an app (TangoRisto, for instance) on a mobile device will help?

I’m on a 24" screen too (my eyes are almost exactly 2ft away from the screen, I measured) and I have no problem reading the stuff on there at default zoom.

You may just not be used to it. I used to have that problem too, but gradually I found it easier to identify characters as I got more familiar with them.

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Interesting, just found out that I use an 125% zoom on everything :slight_smile:

The font heights are in pixels, if you have high pixel density you have smaller letters, it depends on the resolution. Just set it to any value you like, 100% doesn’t mean “normal” here :wink:

Edit: Oh and you change the font size independently from the zoom if the layout gets messed up.

Oh right right, I forgot about that. I’m running at native 1080p. Jeez… I don’t think I’m upgrading to a 4K screen ever.

Thanks for the tip about changing the font independently!

Think Japanese text is often too small. I’ve bought a volume of the Shonen Weekly Jump magazine for reading practice, and I swear, some of the speech bubbles are printed so small that some of the more complex kanji are literally just blobs. Furigana is too small to make out as well.

I’m on NHK News Web on a 24" monitor at 720p using 200% zoom.

I seriously hope this gets better with practice.

Just wait until you get one of those unfortunate ebooks scanned at 144 dpi. Zoom in all you want, you’re only making it worse.

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40" 1080p Flat Screen @ ~9ft away. I keep the forums at 175%, WaniKani at 150%, NHK at 175% and Wikipedia at 200% (sometimes more).

(Yes, I like to do my reviews from bed. x3)

I guess it depends on your level of fluency. If you know kanji very well, you can decipher them even when they’re small, because of context and its general outline.

You should see 8-bit font kana on a 6 inch screen. Now that’s difficult to read!

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Aye, that’s the other thing I was gonna comment. I bought 二ノ国 on the DS, and reading the furigana felt like learning a whole new character set completely.

You’re not alone! 27" screen with everything zoomed to 125% and most Japanese sites I visit at 150-200%.

Japanese scans get unreadable fast. I figure if you’re at a high-enough level, context and general blobby shapes will give you all you need, but I was recently in a chat where a few other Japanese-learners and I were having a go at translating a magazine scan, and there were multiple unknown (and even a few known) kanji that sent us scrambling through radical searches (and even having to make an educated guess as to what the radicals were) because they were basically blobs along with their furigana.

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