Hiragana Font Types

[Ara Kistner]

WhenI was searching for a mobile app that lets you practice writing hiragana, I noticed that a lot of them uses the Gothic font, meaning that さ will be written as 2 strokes and not 3. The most common font in educational textbook uses さ with 3 strokes, and is the recommended font in Japan. So I want to ask you guys something.

Do you think this is a potential problem? Because I heard some beginners being confused with differences in さ,き and り on Gothic font and textbook font. I feel this can be distracting when starting to learn Japanese.

English has the same problem. Some Latin characters have typographical variants, and especially 'g' has a well-known "double-story" variant that is usually not used for handwriting. According to this article, English speakers are almost unaware of this, but this is indeed a confusing problem to people who learn English as the second language. So the variation of hiragana should be a potential problem to beginners, too.

That may be true, but with the Gothic (sans-serif) font I have always considered the second stroke to be a two-part stroke. So while it's technically only two strokes, I think of it as a character written with three parts.

No, it's just a font thing. Some fonts will change the characters in different ways, just like you see in English with the various ways to write lowercase letter 'a.' It's just one more thing for a beginning Japanese learner to learn.

I don't think that it matters too much, but most of the learning materials I used to learn Japanese actually favored the Minch (serif) font. It's not of vital importance what font you use, so long as you are able to recognize the characters involved.

Ultimately, the better you get at reading Japanese, the less various fonts will trip you up. So I would recommend using a clean font to start, and progressing from there. There's no need to hide from the various fonts, because they'll pop up frequently.

That being said, however, since you are writing an app to help learners of the language, I would personally suggest that you use the Minch font. This is because you will find that most newspapers and books published in Japan use the Minch font.

In Excel, you can choose between three types of phonetic guides: full-width katakana, half-width katakana, and hiragana. You can change the font style, font size, and alignment of phonetic guides. You can modify phonetic guides, and you can add phonetic guides to Japanese data that has been entered in a cell. The phonetic character string that was used to enter the Japanese data is used to apply phonetic guides. When you sort sheet data, Japanese data is sorted by its phonetic guides by default. If the correct phonetic guides have been used on characters that use them, Japanese terms are sorted in the same order as they would occur in a Japanese dictionary. If the phonetic guides are not entered correctly, make the necessary corrections.

When you display phonetic guides in the Japanese version of Excel and enter kanji (Chinese characters that are used in the Japanese language), Excel automatically adds the phonetic symbols to the guides.

To use the keyboard to move the cursor to the phonetic guides, press OPTION + SHIFT + UP ARROW. To return to the parent string that the phonetic guides apply to, press OPTION + SHIFT + DOWN ARROW. The color of the parent character string changes while the phonetic guides are being modified.

If the displayed phonetic guides are incorrect, you can select the cell that shows the incorrect phonetic guides and change it by using the same method you use to enter a character string. On the Home tab, under Font, click Phonetic, and then click Edit.

The default alignment of phonetic guides is left alignment (that is, placed along the left edge of the kanji to which the phonetic guides apply). You can change the alignment to no alignment (all phonetic guides are combined and aligned along the left edge of the cell), center alignment (centered against the kanji to which the guides apply), or distributed alignment (set with equal spacing against both edges of the kanji to which the guides apply).

First, make sure you change the editing language to Japanese. Then you can view the font style, font size, and alignment of furigana, a phonetic reading aid, in Excel Online for Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Hong-Kong languages and regions. You can even make minor changes to the text.

Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, Korean, Chinese, Symbols, Numbers, English, etc.

I would like to be able to specify the font for each character type.

This is because some free fonts contain only hiragana, katakana, or other specific character types.

Not in the text editing window, but in the

It will be reflected in the actual string layer.

Since this is a preview, if you close the dialog without saving, it will return to the state before you opened the dialog.

No Font-File will be installed in Krita, Fonts are provided from the operating system you use, so if you want to use a Font in Krita you have to install the Font in Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, Chromebook.

If any of the Fonts you named is installed in the OS you can use and place them in Krita, the first letter in Kanji, the second in Katakana, the third in Hiragana and so on, every letter a different Font if you like, but as said it has to be installed in the OS first not in Krita.

A prototype of a lazily made text tool alternative for Krita (Use at your own risk) - GitHub - KnowZero/Krita-LazyTextTool-Prototype: A prototype of a lazily made text tool alternative for Krita (U...

There is really no such thing as a character type. Now there are character ranges, but every font is different and not all follow standards, especially symbol fonts. Not to mention there are languages, full width characters and etc.

Find a freeware font. I have one called Sword Kanji that uses authentic hiragana and kanji characters and simply maps them to the English keyboard. Have your wife write out what you want to say then find the corresponding character in the font and use that.

We faced the same problems until we finally obtained a Japanese version of Photoshop (Paintshop will do too). As for the Sword Kanji fonts: according to my wife (who also happens to be Japanese) their design seems to be rather Chinese than Japanese. Btw, they can be downloaded from here:

Ahhh, it becomes a little clearer!! In this case, you may as well go for the whole Japanese partition, and use a DOS multi-operating system boot selection utility to switch between the two. Maybe not straight away, but in due time!

Furigana is most often written in hiragana, though in certain cases it may be written in katakana, Roman alphabet letters or in other, simpler kanji. In vertical text, tategaki, the furigana is placed to the right of the line of text; in horizontal text, yokogaki, it is placed above the line of text, as illustrated below.

Furigana may be added by character, in which case the furigana character(s) that correspond to a kanji are centered over that kanji; or by word or phrase, in which case the entire furigana text is centered over several kanji characters, even if the kanji do not represent equal shares of the kana needed to write them. The latter method is more common, especially since some words in Japanese have unique pronunciations (jukujikun) that are not related to readings of any of the characters the word is written with.

The distinction between regular kana and the smaller character forms (yōon and sokuon), which are used in regular orthography to mark such things as gemination and palatalization, is often not made in furigana: for example, the usual hiragana spelling of the word 却下 (kyakka) is きゃっか, but in furigana it might be written きやつか. This was especially common in old-fashioned movable type printing when smaller fonts were not available. Nowadays, with computer-based printing systems, this occurs less frequently.

Various word processing or typesetting software programs, such as Microsoft Word, Adobe InDesign, Adobe InCopy, etc. have features for adding ruby text, especially Japanese furigana. Among formatting features are different rules for aligning the kana over or to the right of the base text, usually either when the base text string is longer than the furigana string or vice versa. Extra spaces may be needed depending on the size of the shorter string (either the ruby string or the base string) relatively to the longer one.

Furigana are most commonly used in works for children, who may not have sufficiently advanced reading skills to recognize the kanji, but can understand the word when written phonetically in hiragana. Because children learn hiragana before katakana, in books for very young children, there are hiraganafurigana next to the katakana characters. It is common to use furigana on all kanji characters in works for young children. This is called sōrubi (総ルビ) in Japanese.

Many children's manga, shōnen and shōjo manga use furigana (again however, rarely on numerals). Shōnen and shōjo manga tend to have furigana for all non-numeric characters, while some manga (such as early volumes of Doraemon and other manga published by Shogakukan), may also ignore furigana on elementary-grade kanji or easy words.[a] Seinen and josei manga ignores furigana most of the time, even on the names of the characters if they're common names, although some publishers may still routinely use furigana for the first mentions of important characters' names in a volume or chapter. There are also books with a phonetic guide (mainly in hiragana but sometimes in rōmaji) for Japanese learners, which may be bilingual or Japanese only. These are popular with foreigners wishing to master Japanese faster and enjoy reading Japanese short stories, novels or articles.

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