It’s also not really productive to completely change the font used across the entire site on a whim with no testing and no reasoning other than “Google Fonts bad.” Perhaps there is another reason, but then why has it not been mentioned?
10 Likes
Big clash with the “image” radicals
Since the switch literally happened to me without warning when I pressed “next” between item #3 and #4 of my lesson batch, I am biased against it
8 Likes
What venom?
2 Likes
The font size for example sentences makes the lines so thin that some strokes are barely visible, making the text almost illegible on PC. I appreciate wanting to change away from a Google font, but this is really not a good font to settle on.
8 Likes
Not to be dismissive of other’s complaints about their dislike for the font, but I will note that I personally think it’s actually rather important to get used to reading other fonts because in real Japanese content you run across all manner of them.
I personally have been using the Jitai Font Randomizer 3rd-party User Script exactly for this reason. It ultimately eliminates a lot of confusion and initial discomfort caused by different fonts.
31 Likes
I too have additional fonts downloaded, and am still stuck with this changed font.
Also I am used to reading tons of fonts, including esoteric stylistic ones from videogames. This one is just not legible on PC during example sentences for me at at all. It is not a good font choice.
7 Likes
Perhaps too strong a word? I couldn’t think of a fitting one. Your statements simply came across as, I don’t know, mean-spirited? to me. Entirely an issue with my own reading of it, not a statement of fact or anything.
2 Likes
Is this possible on an Ipad? I don’t think I can change anything
2 Likes
Being able to read different fonts is great. But almost no computer font will prepare you for the most artistic renderings of kanji you will come across on actual restaurant signage etc.
Font familiarity is also not the purpose of this site. It is charachter recognition and recall.
So it is important to have a clear and immediately legible font. Different fonts are created for different uses. Thin fonts are not designed for large characters.
14 Likes
Exactly this. “It’s good to get used to other fonts” - yeah sure, but this a Kanji learning platform. This site is not designed to adjust you to different fonts in the middle of your studies.
Plus this isn’t a “different” font - it’s a terrible font.
18 Likes
Thanks for the heads up I will take a look. It seems some of the images are thicker than others.
3 Likes
I’m using the Tsurukame app on my iPad, you’ll have more control over font size and type of font (and some more stuff).
4 Likes
Seems to me like you guys need to decide on some standard font weight for the items across the whole site. Then pick a font and re-do all the image-based radicals to fit the new standards. Then re-center all the instances where items appear in boxes to make sure they’re centered with the new font and weight.
There are only, what, 30 image-based radicals? It can’t be that hard to go back and update them all, and then you should never need to touch it again for the rest of WaniKani’s lifetime.
Just checked, there are 37 image-based radicals total. Every image-based radical in levels 23-60 is thick, and every image-based radical in levels 1-22 is thin.
5 Likes
Here it is turned into a janky userscript (and I made it 500 instead)
// ==UserScript==
// @name wanikani.com font-weight 500
// @namespace Violentmonkey Scripts
// @match https://www.wanikani.com/*
// @grant none
// @version 1.0
// @author -
// @description 2/13/2024, 7:18:09 PM
// ==/UserScript==
(function() {
'use strict';
var css = `
.character-header__content {
font-weight: 500;
}
`;
var style = document.createElement('style');
style.type = 'text/css';
style.innerHTML = css;
document.head.appendChild(style);
})();
2 Likes
Yeah, I understand there will always be resistance to change.
And I have no issue with them changing to a different font.
But this font. Beyond the thinness, it just looks so bad at size, weirdly balanced with unnatural stroke angles. They could have chosen a decent non-google font.
(I also was not aware of this apparent hatred for google’s fonts / or is it just generaly anti-corporate sentiment? I’m sure google have many experts who obsess over using the correct font in the applicable situations… I subscribe to a good youtube channel on that very subject.).
8 Likes
The thick one looks so much better than the others!
3 Likes
This font really is thin, wow. Here’s a comparison between WaniKani’s font and my computer/browser default.
WaniKani:
Mine:
Granted, I zoom in on websites all the time for both English and Japanese…
Here are some others I used to use in Jitai for fun back when I used WaniKani.
7 Likes
With google fonts, I think it’s a surveillance and tracking concern. You go to site a.com, you ask google for fonts, you go to site b.com, you ask google for fonts, you go to site c.com, you ask google for fonts, in theory google can now know you visit all three sites a.com b.com and c.com, correlate that activity and build a profile on you.
I believe some browsers have tech to block this, but it gets complicated to know exactly what is and isn’t allowed with third party cookies and so forth, and just stopping the remote requests is a certain way to know the tracking isn’t happening.
10 Likes
Yeah, unless I zoom in by about 175% on Chrome, some of the horizontal strokes are uneven in size for me, basically looking compressed. Because it’s just too thin.
I can strain myself to read it. But I’d rather have a font I can read with ease while doing lessons. This is harder to read than something like Octopath Traveler’s stylistic font upon seeing it for the first time.
5 Likes
This is just a very sloppy change in general and was clearly extremely rushed. I wish WaniKani would be more transparent about the actual reasons behind this change, because “We rushed an overnight change out of nowhere and didn’t bother to test it whatsoever because it was just so absolutely urgent to stop using Google Fonts immediately.” just doesn’t make sense. At all. There has to be some other reason. They’ve been using Google Fonts for over a year now, and all of a sudden they can’t go one week without stopping immediately? Like how hard is it to take one glance at each page before pushing the change to production to make sure it isn’t breaking everything like this? Who just goes and makes a site-wide change without checking the whole site (or even any of the site) first? So strange. This is not how you maintain a web application. The least you can do is test for 5 minutes before making a new release.
I assume this has less to do with Scott and more to do with the instructions he’s been given by Tofugu management. I won’t (and don’t want to) speak for him, but my assumption is that he’s not really happy about this either and knows that it wasn’t properly implemented from a devloper standpoint (just like anybody could tell from just looking at it).
9 Likes