I haven't gotten to the point where I've done much reading in kanji yet, though from my limited experience with reading kanji, I've noticed that sometimes the characters are genuinely hard to read because they're so small and condensed (and not just because I don't know them). This makes it difficult to distinguish between characters if you cannot observe the primitives. In a size 11 or 12 font (whatever is used here), English letters are easily distinguishable ("a" "v" "e") as well as kana ("びゅ" "ゆ" "ネ"). But with the same font size, or smaller, it becomes difficult to identify and tell the difference between "犠" and "議" without squinting or moving closer to the computer (at least for me).

How many of you have the same problem? My eyes are pretty bad (even with my corrective lenses) so there is an added difficulty for me.

On a curious note, I wonder how they accommodate for this problem in Japan, or if it is just a normal thing (and the people with bad eyesight get the short end of the stick). I looked at the back labels of some soda bottles, for instance, and I don't even know how a native Japanese person could read that fine print without a magnifying glass! It blows my mind!

It's harder to see which character 犠, compared to seeing which word 犠牲 is. Same thing with 議 and 会議. After you get used to seeing kanji, you will spend less time looking at exactly which parts make up each character. You also get used to seeing complete sets of shapes, so you don't need to identify every single part of every character in order to be able to read. A good example would be 鬱, I don't believe anyone (familiar with the character) would study each part 木缶木冖?匕彡 before being able to understand what it says, you'd simply be able to recognize it. In other words, context, uniqueness and experience in reading characters in different fonts all contribute to being able to read.

That said, with my less than perfect eyesight I also have to squint and/or move closer to be able to read at times. But usually only when it's a word I'm not very familiar with, or maybe an unexpected word choice, or a font design I'm not used to. All of which point to experience being a very important factor in all this.

Yea, kanji is really hard to read. Any time I'm on a pc or other electronic device, I crank the font size up when I'm trying to read Japanese. Small fonts are just too much of a pain.
Ever wondered why almost all Japanese have to wear glasses? :p

I bought a Fuji scansnap. A lot of time I use it to OCR books but even when I don't OCR, I create pdfs so that I can zoom in on the text. I'm really near-sighted and can't read the text in books like light novels easily.

This is why I like reading with an ipad. If its too small, swipe and you're good.

On a PC, there is a sort of equivalent of that, though, for web browsers at least. You can just hold control and use the mouse scroll wheel to adjust the zoom.

Baseless speculation but I think that the more you are used to reading Japanese, unless the kanji is unfamiliar or the context is strange, a lot of the kanji are read similar to English words: less about individual letters/strokes and more about general shape of the word, structure. That is that the brain has a lot uses a lot of memory recall to parse words and sentences without paying greater detail to the make up of each entity; extracts enough meaning to get an understanding then moves on to the next bit of information.

When you haven't built up the complex network of neural shortcuts, the brain has to do more work to take in relevant information, and has less memory and "intuition" to fall back on for a cached, efficient parsing of data to extract relevant information. Err, and stuff. Baseless speculation.

Zarxrax Wrote:Ever wondered why almost all Japanese have to wear glasses? :p

A fetish for paperwork, extensive neck-down-eyes-peeled-to-the-text study culture, and lack of carrots?

Haych Wrote:ou can just hold control and use the mouse scroll wheel to adjust the zoom.

You should be able to adjust the screen resolution on most computers. Small resolution on a large screen and the text should appear huge. Will effect entire system. Not really a great solution though, lol.

KanjiCrosser Wrote:In a size 11 or 12 font (whatever is used here), English letters are easily distinguishable ("a" "v" "e") as well as kana ("びゅ" "ゆ" "ネ"). But with the same font size, or smaller, it becomes difficult to identify and tell the difference between "犠" and "議" without squinting or moving closer to the computer (at least for me).

How many of you have the same problem? My eyes are pretty bad (even with my corrective lenses) so there is an added difficulty for me.

My eyes are fine, so II can't really make a fair comparison to those with sight differences, but often I don't focus a whole lot on the kanji. Sort of just take it in and, for example the word 食べる, if the font was tiny and I couldn't really make out 食, and it were just a blob, more or less without thinking about it I would read べる and assume that the blob was 食 and not 飲 or 飯 or 館 or something else. Granted, there isn't a lot of fail-safe options there. For all I know I could be reading it wrong without realizing it. I think without learning words with both audio and text I would be screwed relying on this lazy approach.

Did you ever see the paragraph with the mixed up letters which showed that as long as the first and last letters in a word were there, the rest could be in any order and it was still readable? If not, there's a versionhere which also has a Japanese equivalent paragraph. (just to make this a bit more Japanese related ^^)
Pretty much what that paragraph is getting at is that people scan words when we read, not look at them carefully. That's why the faster you read that paragraph, the easier it will be to read. Japanese is the same way. The more experience you get in reading, the faster your reading speed will get, and the less you'll have to look at at certain kanji closely.

^Was thinking of that, though didn't know what to search for to find a Japanese version.

Quote:Did you ever see the paragraph with the mixed up letters which showed that as long as the first and last letters in a word were there, the rest could be in any order and it was still readable?

By this do you mean have you ever read a text/chat message created by someone who was born in the 90's? lol.

Just to chip in, I pretty much agree that it all comes down to experience, familiarity and expectation.

As was mentioned by Bokusenou, it really is remarkable how easy it is to read a sentence in English even if all the letters inside each word are jumbled up, and I guess the same is true for other languages that use an alphabet.

Alternatively, if you're given a piece of paper with some writing on it that's partly faded, or even has some letters missing entirely, you'll still be able to read it quickly and correctly without much effort as your brain will fill in the blanks by what it expects to see based upon what it's seen in the past. For example, if the sentence was something like "there's an apxxxxx tree in my garden", it's pretty obvious that the missing word is apple, and your brain doesn't need to eliminate every word starting with ap before finding one that fits.

Back on topic, I have the same problem in that I often have to expand the font size or zoom in on an image to work out what the kanji are, but it's something I expect, or at least hope, to get better over time as I get more experience in reading Japanese texts.

Bokusenou Wrote:Did you ever see the paragraph with the mixed up letters which showed that as long as the first and last letters in a word were there, the rest could be in any order and it was still readable? If not, there's a versionhere which also has a Japanese equivalent paragraph. (just to make this a bit more Japanese related ^^)

I completed forgot about this study that was done. It makes sense once again to me how we don't necessarily need to look at all the parts of a word in kanji to understand it, but instead just use the context. Of course, if this "lazy" way of reading is not supplemented with studying the kanji by themselves, we may end up forgetting or confusing the characters (which is why RTK is so important!).

Of course, I would think mixing up letters (or syllables) wouldn't work very well with speaking. Can you imagine someone saying みさなん instead of みなさん?

Edit: nm.

Just something to think about. When you're reading at the same speed as a native speaker, you're reading about 600 characters per minute. That's 10 characters per second. You can estimate how much time is spent reading each individual character.

It's all about recognizing the general shapes of the words and knowing where to look to differentiate similar characters like 持 and 待.