Written Kanji

I’m trying to practice written Kanji following Jisho.org, and the characters look so different from the ones on Wanikani. I realize that written Kanji is different than a font, but how do we know which style to follow?
There seem to be a lot of variations online. Sorry for the confusion, but this is new to me. Thank you.

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If you want to write kanji, you should always emulate a font that is supposed to look written, which the default WK fonts are not going to be (though it can very slightly based on your OS or device or something).

Even better yet, you can try to find 教科書 fonts, literally textbook fonts. These are what textbooks use because they accurately represent how characters should be written, so if students copy them, they are copying something that is accurate.

These can still have variation between them, but the important elements (stops, hooks, etc.) are preserved appropriately. If you don’t know what I mean by that, different strokes are supposed to terminate in different ways, and you usually can’t see that in a typical “computery” font where all parts of all lines are the same thickness.

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okay, thank you very much, I’ll take a look.

There is even a “stroke order font” which you can install on your device. The kanji appear with little numbers that indicate the stroke order and direction.
image
There is a logic to the stroke orders that becomes apparent fairly quickly.

The stroke order font does not indicate some of the elements that Leebo mentioned above, however.

I enjoy writing kanji. A year and a half into this, I am starting to write cursive too. :slight_smile:

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thank you, I did install a stroke order userscript, but I wasn’t sure if it was the one I should be learning from. Do you know if there are any websites that are particularity good at illustrating hand-written kanji?

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I have never used any particular websites. I have used a workbook that grade-school children write in, but I can’t give any particular recommendations there, because I threw it away after I completed it.

Many websites give good examples of nice kana writing. If you master that, it should transfer over to kanji without too much thought. The only kanji that I have had any trouble with are the ones with lots of parallel horizontal lines.

I also have a couple of calligraphy books, the best being “Shodo” by Shozo Sato, because it does a nice job of comparing different written scripts. That is the book that got me started in more of a cursive style.

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A pretty nice website that I use for viewing kanji in a variety of typefaces is https://moji.tekkai.com. It has everything from Ming and Gothic to Textbook and “Pen Writing” as well as a bunch of obscure ones.

I don’t know how useful the site is for practicing handwriting but it’s really fun to browse through.

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I don’t know if you are familiar to that but jisho also has a neat animation of writing every kanji, when you open the details of the kanji
i.e.: 漢 #kanji - Jisho.org
I find this always very useful to get a feeling for the writing.

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I use the 漢字ステップ books they are for the kanji kanken test and show you where to pay attention

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yes, thank you, I have been following this.

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