2mo ago

Do people who can read Chinese, Japanese and other non latin scripts use a bigger font size?

I dunno how I ended up there, but I found myself on the wikipedia entry for the name of Japan (Nihon?) which has a lot of Chinese and Japanese script.

It looks very cramped in whatever my default font size is, and a lot of the detail seems difficult to pick out. Particularly in the (I assume) traditional Chinese. Example: 大清帝國

Which got me wondering about font size. Do users of these scripts have different defaults? Or is it just because I'm not used to reading it?

21 comments

I am Japanese.
Japanese people can identify letters by looking at their shapes to some extent, so unless you have presbyopia, there is no problem with small letters.
Even if these were written in the same size as the alphabet, I can read them. ex: 薔薇、憂鬱、贔屓、鳳凰
*Sorry, I'm using machine translation.
- How dare you try to illustrate a point /s

Not too badly. In smaller font sizes, it can be hard to make out individual components of a given character, but in context with other familiar characters, your mind is able to sort of fill in the gaps just through pattern recognition.

As someone who also speaks Chinese natively and have additionally seriously studied classical Chinese and used to read historical documents and books, no not at all.
I always have Chinese text in the same font size as English, never found myself in need of adjusting the font size at all.
However, I am studying German and I do sometimes finding myself wanting to enlarge the font a bit, even though it's the mostly the same Latin script as English.
I think ultimately it depends on how familiar you are with the script, once you are sufficiently familiar you only ever need to be parsing a part of the script when you're reading it, at least most of the time and in daily uses, so glyph stroke density is not in itself an issue.
By the way if you find Chinese script looks cramped, look up the historical Tangut script! XD

The normal font seems fine for most. I think people might have a mental association with the basic shape, and don't need to look into the detail of most characters.
- Yeah, when reading, the brain relies heavily on written context. Kind of like how we can still read those example passages where they jumble a bunch of letters in the middle of the words on purpose.
  I'm sure they could do something very similar in Chinese / Japanese and mess up the internal components of many characters while keeping the overall text mostly readable.

I'm learning Japanese right now myself, and I don't know if it's just something you learn or if it's something native speakers just get used to, because I have a hard time telling some kanji apart when the font is too small. It's mostly just an issue with online resources tho.

Not Chinese or Japanese scripts, but I do use other non-latin scripts.
I read Devanagri (Hindi) - नमस्ते
I also read Gurumukhi (Punjabi) - ਸਤਸ੍ਰੀਅਕਾਲ
And no, we don't use a larger font size.

Fluent Japanese speaker here. The font in the article is a bit too small for comfort, but nothing major. The one in your post is perfectly fine, and in fact I wouldn't even think to make bigger.

I cant read arabic without zooming in a lot more than I do for latin text
- I have wondered whether it'd be worthwhile to do a ground-up revision of Latin script for readability.
  Like, the basic letterforms date back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, go through a bunch of alphabets that were designed to be used on rather different writing and display systems: hand carving, stroke-based systems with brushes, etc. Some didn't have the same set of letters that modern Latin does, didn't need to worry about them being distinguishable.
  It's not like someone sat down and said "what is the optimal mechanism for onscreen display for human eyes", gathered a bunch of data, and went from there.
  I mean, sure, it's not awful, and we've tweaked it (like "programmer fonts" that have more-clearly-distinguishable "0" and "O" or "1", "l", "I", "!", and "|"). We've specialized some alphabets: a cursive capital "Z" doesn't look much like a printed capital Z at all: 𝒵. A lowercase "a" differs a fair bit from a cursive lowercase "𝓪".
  But I feel like we probably could produce a better display alphabet, given modern science. Test what people can easily distinguish, and start from there, don't worry about backwards compatibility and just target present-day display systems. Surely we could avoid things like the similar "i" and "j". Capital and lowercase forms of some letters could be more-clearly distinguished. We don't care how many strokes are required for a letter if it's not handwritten. It's easy enough to fill in an area of a letter if a human isn't having to do it by hand.
  
  Well, Hangul was developed precisely with efficiency in mind. Maybe not for screens specifically, though.
  
  I think it would be incredibly hard to get people to switch without a compelling reason. Keep in mind that our modern keyboard layout is 150+ years old despite alternatives existing. Arabic letters are very close to English ones in sound but the readability suffers for me at least because it's written in cursive with a lot of very similar-looking shapes (think of an i with 1 dot on top and an i with 2 dots being 2 separate letters) necessitating bigger font sizes.
  English is about half of the internet and the modern lingua franca so unless it gets replaced or evolves over time, either of which would take decades, I don't think any central body could make that change.

There no "bigger font" necessary lol, its the same size.
I don't read each stroke of a character, I see it and know what it is. Just as with English, you don't read letter for letter, you see the combination of letters and you instantly recognize the word.
_繁體 and _傳統 are still readable lol 😅

Regular font size is the same in Japan. 11 or 12 pt. or whatever. For Japanese, try "mincho" (serif) as opposed to "gothic" (sans) and you might find it easier.
Easy to read either with a little practice, tho.

I've been learning Japanese for a few years now. I've found that over time I'm able to recognize some characters I've become very familiar with even if they're too small to make out the fine details, or if I get too brief of a glimpse of them to do so, maybe due to a combination of context and unconcious pattern/shape recognition.

I am an Arab and I do face this issue whenever I read Google results or Arabic wikipedia. But on most websites where Arabic is the main language , the font size is larger and readable

For me, as someone who has at least learned a little bit of Japanese, the more complex a character is, the more likely it is I would personally love a slightly bigger font to make sure I am correct on what the character is if it's kanji. Same thing applies for me to Chinese Hanzin (regardless of whether it's simplified or traditional). That, and for ツ (tsu) and シ (shi) in katakana because my brain has difficulty telling the difference if the font is small enough.
- Same here, I know most hiragana and katakana but the kanji printed in some of the text books and manga destroyed me, so hard to read and differentiate.
  tsu and shi are also a pain, especially since handwritten Japanese has so many variations of them. Almost impossible to differentiate if you don't know the word.

Might also be that typical display resolution differs around the world to some degree.
Here's a screenshot of Netscape Navigator back around 2000.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Irix_Netscape451.png
That's kind of obnoxious to read on my phone screen at 1:1 in 2025. Same software package I once used, just that screens have changed.
Or age of typical user's eyes in a language region. I mean, I've slightly bumped up font size over the years in terms of what's comfortable onscreen as I've gotten older.

21 comments