Best Hiragana Fonts

[Marguerite Litscher]

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.

I am working on a japanese website and have a hard time finding a font which looks good in japanese. I was surprised that so few fonts seem to exist for japanese. My team has contacted several web font providers without much success. Only one company could offer a web font for japanese but it was 35 megabytes which is far to big for the clients to download to their browsers.

Web-font for Japanese, though there are few providers exist, is not really practical as you found the size of the font data is too big to download. Usually Japanese font has 8,000-16,000 glyph so making new fonts means you need to make at least 8,000 glyph, which is pretty heavy task. As a result of it, there are very few variations in Japanese fonts, and Japanese users also care about fonts less than Latin-character users.

Most Japanese websites use default font sets provided on Windows or Mac. The latest ones are Meiryo and Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro. For older versions such like Windows XP, it is good to add former default fonts MS Gothic(or MS Mincho)/Osaka.

Here's an answer in 2021 after my research and from my experience living and working in Japan. I like this article, though it is in Japanese so I'll do my best to summarize. Here are what some major companies are using in Japan:

Something I learned working here: some Japanese prefer Gothic or other fonts over Mincho fonts, as Mincho looks more "Chinese" according to some. None of the companies above use Mincho as evidence to that. Like it or not, I guess that's something to keep in mind when branding.

This is an old thread but for anyone doing research on this now, you should note that Meiryo is no longer a standard font loaded with Windows. Since Windows 10, the new default font is Yu Gothic. You can still install Meiryo manually however. Please see this article

I am no font/design expert, but just about every Japanese PC should have basic Latin fonts like the ones you mentioned installed, so they will work. But those fonts give a kind of Western look to Japanese characters. If you want to use fonts that Japanese sites typically use I would start by browsing some of the more popular Japanese sites and using things like Firebug or the Chrome developer tools to examine the CSS and see what fonts they reference. For example, yahoo.co.jp currently has this CSS:

The "gothic" typeface fonts seem fairly popular these days: on Windows, fonts like MS Gothic, MS PGothic, etc. Ming typeface is also widely used. These are the default browser font settings for Firefox on my Japanese Windows machine:

BTW, the "Osaka" font was a standard font on Japanese Macs in the 90s. Unless you want that "retro" feel, is highly recommended to use "Hiragino Sans" (not Kaku Gothic that's deprecated) for macOS and iOS devices for a consistent and modern look and better legibility. Also Hiragino Sans has far more font weights (10) than Kaku Gothic (only 2).

For whom may come in the future, there is a great (long and deep) article on this very matter written by a japanese copywriter: The Most Comprehensive Guide to Web Typography in Japanese or in the archive.org, because there is apparently an issue on mhdigital.

'Noto Sans CJK JP' is also available for Ubuntu linux. It is provided as an official package "fonts-noto-cjk". Still manual installation is required, it is expected to have it installed on Japanese Ubuntu machines.

Question:I'm currently taking a Japanese History course, and typing up (what I believe to be) a very pretty set of course notes. However, I'm having trouble finding an appropriate font. I'm currently using one of my Chinese fonts which has a medium calligraphic style to it, however it doesn't have great Japanese support. I am strongly preferential to free fonts, for the obvious reason of being a poor university student.

I've searched for Japanese fonts across the internet but I'm having significant trouble finding a Japanese font that matches my body text (EB Garamond). If anyone can point me in the right direction that'd be amazing.(Please pay no attention to the grammatical/spelling errors, this is from the latest class period and hasn't been edited yet)

OP's comments: This was originally on the Japanese SE website, but they quickly closed and deleted it without consideration of the fact that their community was probably the single best resources for this topic.

My computer seems to have Kozuka Mincho Pro, which has a huge base of glyphs. Even some white-on black kanji and a large selection in both hiragana and katakana. The font came, as far as I know, with my copy of Adobe CS3.

I have seen a number of books successfully pairing Garamond with such a Japanese font. This style of font is called kyōkasho tai (kyōkasho = "textbook", tai = "typeface") and is used, as the name would suggest, in Japanese textbooks. Its shapes are not stylized as in the minchō fonts (right):

and resemble the character that is actually written by hand. (Very much like the single-storey "ɑ" is handwritten and the double-storey "a" is used in most stylized fonts; similarly for "ɡ" and "g".)

Of course good Japanese fonts are almost never free. You can see if the sample of the Kyotai font by Motoya contains all the glyphs you need. (You may have to sign up to their newsletter to download the sample.)

Free Japanese Font is all about Japanese fonts that are free to download! This site aims to help you download high quality Japanese fonts that supports hiragana, katakana, kanji characters which normally hard to find.

I am in Japan and often have to type in Japanese language. In the windows world this was quite easy and straightforward with the Japanese IME.

Can I obtain some guidance for dummies to have similar IME kind of Japanese input solution in Manjaro? I am using GNOME.

I found this article, but kinda lost on say, for example, how to enable UIM.

I have tried to enable Japanese input from the settings > regions and language, but this does not seem to work.

As for installing fonts I reccomend you install

otf-ipafont - likely will be the main font you want to use

ttf-hanazono - a good quality font for backup

ttf-sazami - outdated but some old programs work best with it, likely wont use but good to have anyway

Some other fonts are listed here Localization/Japanese - ArchWiki but the ones I listed will cover you in most cases

P.S.

Build of the package ibus-mozc-ut took time around 20 min. In addition to that, it might be possible that I already installed some Japanese fonts when I was trying to get fcitx working in Manjaro.

It might be a noob issue, but If I manage to get past that and get fcitx5 working as well (not at the same time, since it might cause issues, I guess), it would be amazing for newcomers to refer to this post in the future.

To sum it up - it is actually really easy (with your guide) and fast to set up fcitx and everything is in Manjaro repositories! Config-tool has more options and it is more particular in terms of keyboard shortcuts and usabilty set up.

I have a Japanese laptop, I live in Japan.

In Ubuntu21.4 it was simple to add mozc input, but not looking quite so easy from the above messages, im having difficulty as a beginner to follow whats required.

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!

3a8082e126