I find it almost impossible to read high-stroke-number characters on most webpages, especially in forum.koohii.com. E.g.:

桑, 橡, 藤, 機, 総, 疑, 鑑, 襲, 驚, 露, 艦, 鶴, 躍, 顧, 魔, 圏, 犠, 囑, 馨, 屬

I often need to do Zoom In a few times in my browser (Chrome) to be able to make these guys out. (Virtual magnifying glasses that I've tried don't help with reading: one just gets a larger pixels that remain as indistinct as they were originally.)

But then again, I'm a noob. For those who can actually read Japanese fluently, do you ever need to "zoom in" like this to be able to read a character? Or can you somehow tell what they are?

gfb345 Wrote:I find it almost impossible to read high-stroke-number characters on most webpages, especially in forum.koohii.com. E.g.:

桑, 橡, 藤, 機, 総, 疑, 鑑, 襲, 驚, 露, 艦, 鶴, 躍, 顧, 魔, 圏, 犠, 囑, 馨, 屬

I often need to do Zoom In a few times in my browser (Chrome) to be able to make these guys out. (Virtual magnifying glasses that I've tried don't help with reading: one just gets a larger pixels that remain as indistinct as they were originally.)

But then again, I'm a noob. For those who can actually read Japanese fluently, do you ever need to "zoom in" like this to be able to read a character? Or can you somehow tell what they are?

You generally don't have to. The reason isn't that the kanji aren't hard to make out, but that context usually leaves little to chance. If a kanji is by it self in a sentence, it's usually clear what it means from the sentence itself since similarly looking kanji often do not have similar meanings. When it comes to compounds, you generally have to know the compound to read it fluently anyway, and if you know the compound, you will recognize it even if one of the kanji in it is a bit hard to recognize.

Yes to all except the last three, and 驚, which I mistook for 篤. Using FireFox 3.5 at 1200x800.

馨 is the only one where I can't really make out what the strokes are, but that's because I don't know the character. Tobberoth gave a good response; even when kanji are blobs (like on small game boy screens or whatever), if you know what the word is from the context, and you see the general shape of the character, you can figure it out.

Most gameboy games actually just use hiragana/katakana for most text (other than very basic kanji) I've found, which is why I haven't bothered vocab mining any.

I tried to vocab mine Zelda II on Famicom and nearly vomited when I found out that everything was katakana. It's strange since Zelda I at least used hiragana+katakana.

But anyways... what Tobberoth said. If you know the words and you have context then it's not a big deal. I sometimes have to translate blotchy faxes of handwritten documents and it's not too bad except for places/names.

No to these two: 囑 屬. These are also two characters I never saw in my life so far.

I dont know what OS or Browser you're using, but with Firefox on Mac OS X, you can do cmd and + to "Zoom In" (View -> Zoom -> Zoom In)

Shouldn't be too hard to do this on other browsers as well.

Ok, this is weird, I was just coming on here to post about this very topic. But anyway, the nice thing about using Rikaichan is you can hover over and actually read these kanji blobs.

i can read them just fine... study a little longer and you will be able to too only if they were significantly smaller than that where it actually begins to change the shape of some of the primitives used is when I have difficulty. context helps a ton to pick out kanji. for example when i see 魔　i think about all the times i have seen the word 魔法 used in context and instantly get the meaning out of it

Nemotoad Wrote:But anyway, the nice thing about using Rikaichan is you can hover over and actually read these kanji blobs.

You're right, Rikaichan is awesome for this.

Thanks!