I was thinking the same, Elenkis. If you teach people “this is what 八 looks like, and if you’re not seeing that then you need to adjust your computer settings” then you’re either going to wind up with a lot of threads like this, or a lot of confused people.

I said the default font for Anki was Arial. At least it is for me, and I’m on Windows 7. Meiryo is included in Vista and 7 as the new default Japanese font (it replaces MS Gothic as the default). Though, why Arial is set as the default font in Anki, I’m unsure of.

Sorry, I was a little unclear in my previous post – let me clarify. Arial is the default font for Anki because it’s the default font for Windows – Anki, like most other
programs, uses the Windows default fonts by default (or whichever font the user has chosen to use). However, it’s only the default for English characters – it doesn’t have any Japanese characters, be it kanji or kana. For Japanese, the Asian default font is used – be it Mincho or Gothic or Meiryo. (That said, my Windows 7 laptop uses MS Mincho by default, though I haven’t checked to see if it has Meiryo at all. I tried to install a new kanji font a while back, but I couldn’t seem to work out how – I installed it by the normal way that I’ve done a hundred times before, but it didn’t show up in the font list afterwards…)

@ hey
The image works fine. Not sure what else to suggest. Maybe you can alter the font on Ankidroid?

Why do you say it doesn’t matter if they look the same? Won’t that make it hard to learn the kanji that use them? Or at least to look up the kanji that use them?

In the image they look different enough for me to tell the difference. Unfortunately, on the Droid even that subtle difference is gone. It’s like telling the difference between “A” and “A”.

Sorry if I’m being dense on a key point.

Possibly he wants to use it as the “hat” radical (whatever its name is) which appears at the top of characters like 食 or 今. But those are 人. Don’t look at me, I’m just guessing.

Frankly, for someone who wants to rely so much on just learning the kanji on computers and not learning to write them, Koichi really doesn’t seem to have put too much thought into how different fonts change things. I mean, some characters even look completely different in different styles of writing.. Hashi even posted a rant about it on Tofugu earlier this month.

Elenkis – Oh that does take a load off of my mind. Thanks!

Joel – Personally I found I could read hiragana faster after I learned to write it. I can see why memorizing the stroke order for every radical, and kanji isn’t the best use of time early on, but I can see doing it at some point to help with reading.