Recommended Japanese-Chinese fonts for students learning Japanese

Summary: True Pure Land Scriptures Regular Script, Autumn Water Typeface

Due to historical reasons, displaying Chinese characters on computers has always been a headache:

For designers, designing Chinese characters is not like designing English, often requiring tens of thousands of engineering efforts, and designers often only design the shapes of Chinese characters from the perspective of China or Japan, easily overlooking the subtle differences in the shapes of the same character in Chinese and Japanese;
For users, when a piece of text contains both Chinese and Japanese characters, if the fonts are not set separately, the situation shown in the image below will occur—software will automatically switch to the default font, resulting in an overall disjointed appearance.

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Students majoring in Japanese should have heard of "Mincho" and "Gothic," which correspond to the Chinese fonts "Song" and "Hei," respectively. The Chinese "Kai" style is generally referred to as "Kyokasho" in Japanese fonts—the fonts recommended in this article are mainly of this type.

Kyokasho Typeface#

First, let's talk about the difference between "handwritten" and "printed" typefaces. "Song" and "Hei" are both "printed" typefaces, while most Kai typefaces can be considered "handwritten." However, strictly speaking, only fonts designed directly based on actual handwriting, like "Zhonghua Boutique Font Library," can be considered true "handwritten" typefaces, but I have not yet encountered genuine handwritten Japanese fonts.

(Font Name: Founder Wang Xianzhi Small Kai)

Most people learning Japanese often refer to domestically published textbooks/materials and find it difficult to find original handwritten documents by Japanese people. Domestic Japanese textbooks often irresponsibly use "Mincho," while Japanese elementary and middle school textbooks mostly use the aforementioned "Kyokasho" typeface—our elementary school lower-grade textbooks do not use Song but Kai. The differences between them can be referenced in the image below:

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Upon realizing the issues with the printed typefaces used in textbooks, I began to use the character shapes provided by the Weblio online dictionary's "Digital Daijisen" as the standard (at that time, I did not know the concept of "Kyokasho," I just thought the dictionary should be more authoritative), and it was a long time before I realized that it still used printed typefaces:

Compared to printed typefaces, the biggest feature of Kyokasho typefaces is that the character shapes are closer to actual handwriting (even suggesting stroke order), making them more suitable as fonts for learning Japanese.

However, creating such fonts is quite troublesome, so there are not many available, and with Japanese font manufacturers having a strong awareness of copyright, the number of fonts that can be found is even less.

Now let's get to the main topic and start recommending fonts.

True Pure Land Scriptures Regular Script#

Directly quoting the official website:

A regular script font designed with the printing of scriptures for recitation in mind. It covers all the external characters of the three Pure Land sutras and the main scripture. The special symbols are fully compatible with "True Pure Land Scriptures Mincho."

The character shapes it includes are very numerous, and even when reading classical texts, it is rare to encounter abnormal font displays. However, its support for English and simplified Chinese is not very good; I generally only use it when reading Japanese original novels. It often displays abnormally in places where Chinese and Japanese are mixed in Word, Obsidian, etc., but its merits outweigh its flaws, and this font is worth mentioning before I introduce my personal favorites.

Autumn Water Typeface#

Every character starting from here is an advertisement

If you have used WeChat Reading, you should be familiar with "Kasu Maki." This font was manually completed with simplified Chinese characters based on the Japanese textbook font Klee, so it rarely appears awkward in mixed Chinese and Japanese contexts.
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However, the developer modified characters with differences in Chinese and Japanese shapes according to Chinese writing habits, which can easily "mislead" Japanese learners. Here are some important character shape adjustments:
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(Guess which side is Kasu Maki, hint: "Chinese and Japanese")

And "Autumn Water Typeface" retains the Japanese character shapes of Klee while completing the simplified characters with Kasu Maki—satisfying both daily typesetting needs and language learning needs.

However, the usage scenarios of the fonts mentioned in the article are also quite limited—many software do not support directly using font files in ttf format; moreover, the aforementioned fonts are generally not available in theme stores, making it even more "difficult to change the font" for most people.

I mainly use them in the following software:

Anki: Customized through CSS
Obsidian: After installing the font, just select it in the app's "settings"
KOReader: Place the font file in the Fonts folder
Jingdu Tianxia: Font files can be placed in any folder, just find and select them in the app
Kindle: Must be placed in a specified path

Finally, one point to emphasize: when sending files to others in Word document format, it is best not to use the fonts mentioned above. If the recipient does not have the corresponding font files installed, Word will automatically convert to other fonts, which may even display as garbled text. If you must use them, it is recommended to save as PDF before sending.

Common Font Character Sets#

Next, I will introduce an important reference indicator for selecting fonts: "Character Set."

The broader the character set covered by a font, the better it can maintain the overall style consistency of a piece of text when mixed Chinese and Japanese are used, leading to a better experience in daily use.

However, this is not absolute; attention must also be paid to the specific range of the covered character set.

Here are some common fonts and their covered character sets, using the tools from Ye Sha Zhi Le's open-source projects on GitHub and Gitee.

Mincho
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Song
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True Pure Land Scriptures Regular Script

Klee One
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Kasu Maki

If you prefer Hei typefaces, Genka Gothic and the series of Hei typefaces produced by Wenquan Yiyuan are both good choices.

Genka Gothic
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Wenquan Yiyuan
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If you will encounter very obscure traditional characters and variant characters, then Huayuan Mincho should meet the requirements best—this should be the font with the largest character set currently, and it is the only font that includes all Chinese characters in the Unicode character set.
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(The above image only shows the character set of one font file; this font consists of 7 files)