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