As I continue to work on my levels in WK, I feel more and more confident about my reading skills in japanese. HOWEVER, I find there are two things that constantly ruin that confidence.
1.- Most websites use fonts for kanjis that are tiny!. And unless the kanji is simple and I am extremely familiar I can’t distinguish the strokes enough to figure out its meaning. And just keeping the zoom in the browser high all the time just ruins the experience, same with increasing font sizes in windows, it makes a mess of most websites and programs.
2.- Whenever I try to read kanjis in a font that is different from wanikani’s I just can’t make sense of it. I downloaded a bunch of mangas on my kindle and if the kanjis are “spiky” “bold” or unusual in any way, they are impossible for me to read (it doesn’t help that most of the manga are low definition and even if I zoom on them they just become more blurry (even if they are amazon bought!!!)).
Does this happen to you as well?, if it does what do you do to combat this phenomenon?
Both of those things come with practice. As you learn more kanji and words, you need to make out the individual kanji strokes less often because your brain knows what to expect. Regarding the manga font, the more manga you read the less of an issue this will be. It’s just a matter of exposure.
It’s probably a bit of that and a bit of what @seanblue mentions. You’ve gotten used to reading English via the shapes and your brain is pretty good at it.
For kanji, you have to learn what parts of the shape are important and what you need to pay attention to.
I’m getting better at small sizes after reading for a while but I still have to set the Japanese font about 2 or 3 points bigger than English to be comfortable.
For now, try increasing the font size or using your reading glasses.
sometimes it’s also just the print quality. i haven’t read much yet, but i’ve definitely noticed quite some variation in print (or scan) quality. in one of the bookclubs here the people with paper editions also found the print difficult to read.
beyond that, i agree with what the others have said. get exposure to different fonts, get used to reading in different contexts. and (if reading digital versions) zoom in.
I am 34 and I also have difficulties trying to read small text because of strokes, even on nhk easy news when there is a word I haven’t learned, so furigana appears, I have to check again with yomichan to see if it is this or that kanji and also the furiagana if it is a ぱ or ば for example.
