Chinese Font Changed

The Chinese font was recently changed. I don’t think I did this myself, but who knows. How do I change it back to a normal block style font? (FYI - Japanese looks fine)

Funny enough, the beautiful font LingQ is using now was the same as the one I used at university for both Japanese and Chinese. With the previous lingQ font, it took me a while to transition to it. Sometimes I couldn’t recognise characters I could write by hand! Additionally, I had to enlarge the text size just to recognise them.

Now the font has changed, it’s taken a little adjustment, but I prefer this style. A bonus is the ability in the lesson itself now to increase/decrease the text size, without affecting the whole screen. (Thanks LingQ!)

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How about an answer to this? Every other font for Chinese characters I see on the site is standard block form. Editing, creating new content, and all the Japanese fonts. It’s just the Chinese reading page that got the “calligraphy” look. I hope this is just some sort of mistake because I really dislike this font.

Increasing the text size is a feature that many people (including me) asked for years ago. Finally it’s possible, thanks! Was it so difficult? The Kai font is OK for me. But LingQ still doesn’t recognize words like 头疼 (headache) and can not be used for traditional script. So I will still use one of LingQ’s better (and free) alternatives. LingQ has boxes with round edges, but that will not help language learning at all.

When we get beginners on the site to study Chinese, it requires a big shift for them since the font is very different from the standard textbook font, and while advanced learners can adapt pretty easily, some beginners were reporting trouble reading the small characters. After some user feedback, we tested some things out and decided that a new font would likely suit the needs of more people, and the ability to adjust the font size would be helpful in making text (especially Chinese and Japanese) more legible. We are hoping to spend more time on Asian languages in the near future, hopefully adding support for traditional characters and better support for Pinyin. In addition to this, we will also be looking at adding the ability to select between multiple fonts.

Unfortunately we don’t currently support multiple fonts, so this new font will likely be what we settle upon for the next while here, at least in the interest of increasing readability in the interim. After a few days have passed you may get used to it, but we do have the ultimate goal to support multiple fonts to allow even greater customization of the reading experience.

@Alex - the font you are using isn’t standard at all, not even in text books. “Block form” fonts are much more common. For example: 這種字體是好多了. I have many text books and beginning Chinese materials, and all of them use block form fonts. The calligraphy font you changed to is pretty, and fairly common on signs and calligraphy books. So I don’t know who is telling you that the calligraphy font you’ve chosen is better, but they are wrong. Just look at what’s all over the internet if you don’t believe me. Also, I’d be glad to send you screen shots of several textbooks if you’d like.

LingQ is my main place for reading Chinese. I want to be accustomed to reading one of the most common fonts, the kind that’s all over the internet, in nearly every book, and almost all subtitles. Please change the font back to what it was.

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@Julz611 - I’m not going to take your side on this, so please stop sending roses to me because I reached 20000 words in French and such. Who one earth sends roses to someone they don’t know because they’ve reached a certain word count? That’s creepy, but explainable. I figure you had something to do with this font change, am I right?

Regarding font sizes, I don’t really care. Are there any browsers out there that still don’t allow one to make text bigger? Maybe this is some sort of mobile device issue. homofaber has a good point about parsing, which has been brought up many times before - is this going to be ignored again? And how about my complaint about spacing? There should be no spaces between characters/words; right now the system has a large space between characters and a very large space between what it perceives are words (see homofabar’s complaint).

@Wulfgar - Oh my gosh - did you get out of the wrong side of the bed? I have absolutely nothing to do with the font change. I simply “put up with” the old font - LingQ staff never had a clue as to what I thought about it. I found out others had difficulty like myself with the pre-existing font, from Alex’s response to you, just like anyone else. And I find that Beijing University press does use the current font in their publications.

@Julz611 - actually, I was fine this morning until I read your comments of “support”, which came right after your attempt to quash my request to restore the correct font. 2 roses and a wall comment. First time you ever contacted me. Ever. I don’t like your tactics or your dishonesty. And stop trying to make this about nationality.

The comment seems to have dissappeared.

Maybe consider this; the current font is much closer to handwritten form. People with good handwriting will write like this, others’ will be even more illegible if you are not accustomed to reading handwriting. If the block form is all you read, you’ll be without hope reading many things written by hand. It can be embarrassing to not recognize even basic words when handwritten.

If that’s not important to you, then I guess it doesn’t matter. But I find this font a happy medium. You can read normal font all over the internet, in books, and subtitles as you stated, and it’s easy to read. I find this current font good training for learners. Something to consider. But it will be good to have multiple fonts to choose from. They should not have changed the font until enabling that function.

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Relax, bruh. This is a language learning COMMUNITY. We help and encourage each other. I got a rose on my known word badge from her too. It’s not creepy. It’s called being supportive. Learn to take a compliment on your achievements…

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I happen to like the change to this more caligraphy style font. I agree that it’s good to see various different fonts. On the site it’s caligrphy and on the app it’s typeface. As a beginner I find it helps me to focus more on the essence and actual little strokes of the character instead of only roughly getting used to the general shape of it in that particular font and being disoriented when the font changes.

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I am admittedly somewhat thrown for a loop with this change. I’m not recognizing a lot of simple characters that I don’t give a second thought to when in block form. That being said, I do think this would be a nice feature (giving a more handwritten feel) if I could still see what on earth it looks like when less ornate and in block form. Oh well, what’s done is done I suppose and I’ll get on with adjusting.

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Thanks to everyone for their feedback on this. I agree that we probably shouldn’t have made this change without first adding a way to support multiple fonts. For now, as mentioned, we’re likely to stick with this new font now in the interim but we will be looking at adding significantly more functionality to make it easier for learners of Asian languages to study on LingQ.

How long should I expect the interim to be?

Honestly, this goofy font is pretty annoying. I only use this site to read news articles, I’d rather not to have to read them in this calligraphy style. Imagine having to read a newspaper that was printed in a handwritten style. Nonsense.

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OK, we’ve added a tweak here to change the font. You’ll find this option by clicking on the gear icon at the top of a lesson.

I think there’re three fonts now. But the first and the third fonts look alike. Is it because I don’t have such font on my computer?