As a graphic designer understanding this and the movements between Songti, kaiti is amazing and also as a beginner learned as of this month this is the best advice ever. Thank you 谢谢
Thank you for bringing this to our attention! It's a shame 楷体 fonts aren't as readily accessible in many apps, it looks so much more beautiful and authentic. Interesting engineering problem indeed.
@@microcolonel this option is only available after installing the free "KaiTi Stroke Order Diagrams" add-on. I asked the developer about it since I noticed 過 was different between 宋体 and 楷体. Apparently one is a Taiwan variant, yet they still strangely have the same Unicode code point. There may be more issues like this that they've yet to check which is why it's still 'experimental'.
OMG thank you so much! I was trying to teach some people about writing in Chinese and I wanted to know that Chinese font that looks easy to understand strokes. It turned out to be Kaiti. Thank you so much again!
I am a Japanese-learning intruder (but I am also a language-geek, that's why I'm here) and personally I find the style you call kaiti so much better than the other two. The characters come to life to me, they are visible in every part, every stroke clear. I can also guess the stroke order of characters I don't know. And this happens even if I am a beginner. On the other hand, the kanas (the two Japanese syllabaries) are more readable in heiti. They look much more beautiful in kaiti but are more practical in heiti. That's just my sensation, of course, and, as I said, I'm just a beginner.
Heiti = Arial for Chinese Songti = Times new roman for Chinese Kaiti = Chinese for Chinese I honestly like Songti font's design most, as it looks very formal and tame, but I agree that Kaiti is the definitive version of Chinese characters
i was thinking of courier new for songti, which is slab serif. kaiti is still times new roman like, serif. it is just that what we associate with serif is the more reserved fonts. there are a lot of different serif fonts with distinct styles.
Thanks for the info! After watching your video, I realized I can change my Anki flashcards to Kaiti by changing the CSS to font-family:cursive. Apparently the font family of "sans-serif" maps to the OS's default Heiti font, "serif" maps to Songti, and "cursive" maps to Kaiti. It looks so much better now!
I think another good font family to practice from is FangSongTi! It’s like a combination of KiaTi and SongTi and mimics the way characters would look if written by pen. It’s great because it still retains the dynamic flow of KaiTi fonts. Sometimes due to the thickness of KaiTi fonts I find it hard to mimic with a pen so FangSongTi was a great alternative to help me get past that!
I totally agree with you that Kaiti is the best font for learning. I really love Kaiti font a LOT. It' so beautiful. I don't understand why it's not popular.
The problem is, on digital screens, you need to increase the font size in order to read Kaiti clearly. On Mac, you generally need 14pt or larger size. On Windows, you might need 20pt or even more. The other reason is computerized Kaiti font is not as “lively” as human-written. Designing with it looks much Comic-Sans-ish. Heiti is for faster reading and clarity -- It is the equivalence of Helvetica-style font in the western world.
Although Kaiti is very nice, I'm sticking with my Heiti-style handwriting because of its clean readability (and im a student so its better in exams so that the markers can read my words easily)
There's a Chinese restaurant I pass every day as I walk into town called "名人客" - it annoys my silightly OCD mind as the first character in their sign is kaiti and the last two characters are heiti. I'm probably one of the few non-Chinese who even notice it!
Writing is very fan. I find it very very interesting than memorizing characters, basically because I suck at memorizing things. 😐 Thank for this genuine advice!
Correction: 宋体 came in the 明(Ming) dynasty. From my knowledge the fonts used printing in the song dynasty wasn't standardised, and it was only standardised in the Ming dynasty. However, the name of "Song宋体“ comes from the fact that printing began back then.
I want to learn Chinese by myself. I use Kaiti (楷体) 16 pt when typing in Microsoft Word because it looks clear for me. I wonder what font size native Chinese speakers use when they type in Microsoft Word?
Ik the reason why Cs you need to know where to put pressure & where not thats so said from where to where to drive the pen/brush while writing the strokes... :) & for doing so you need to see first of all where is the start point on every stroke :)
Note that China and Taiwan use different Kaiti fonts on Windows, which are KaiTi and DFKai-SB. KaiTi has the Chinese standard which simplifies characters often, and it's more suitable to write horizontally. DFKai-SB has the Taiwanese standard which is the most strict Chinese writing standard in the world currently, it researches the source of characters and makes characters as distinguishable as possible, this font is more suitable to write vertically.
@@Levi_Highway More differences between the two fonts. *DFKai-SB* Periods (full stops), commas, and enumeration commas appear in the middle. Latin alphabet characters are serif. *KaiTi* Periods (full stops), commas, and enumeration commas appear on the bottom left in horizontal text. Periods (full stops), commas, and enumeration commas appear on the upper right in vertical text. Latin alphabet characters are sans serif. Italicizing vertical text in both fonts creates an unusual effect of making the characters slant downwards. I use FZZhongKai-08 which supports only Traditional Chinese characters. It's a useful proofreading tool to spot any Simplified Chinese characters that may have crept into the text.
@@RaymondHng FZZhongKai-08 does not support Traditional Chinese, it displays Simplified Chinese in its most common way of traditional Chinese, this may cause many errors because Simplified Chinese often have two or three ways to write in Traditional Chinese.
There is also a 楷書 font from TW MOE that is quite good, and will be familiar to Taiwanese people. MS KaiTi has one nice added benefit: it also supports all common Japanese characters, including kana.
@@Levi_Highway That is incorrect. FZZhongKai-B08 does, in fact, support only Traditional Chinese characters on my Windows computer as a brush stroke font. If you try to format a Simplified Chinese character with FZZhongKai-B08 font, it displays the character as PMingLiU font. I use FZZhongKai-B08 font for all our Traditional Chinese text documents on our website.
Thanks for the information,i am learning hantse nearly one year and now thre months ago i started to wright them using bi mo yan zhi,and feels the real way to get a beautyfull whrigting. Hay xuyao name nuli,ke she wo bu zaihu......hao xuesheng nuli xuexi.... Xiexie ni de bangzhu,wo feichang gaoxing ni de shepin WAN SUI LAOSHE
My brain loves the sanserif of Heiti. The older font styles seem cluttered and complicated to my mostly screen reading eyes. Maybe I'll learn Kaiti one day, but it isn't an urgent goal for my Chinese learning. 🤷
Somewhat off topic.. what’s with the typed version of “a”? The only people I’ve ever known who write that type of “a” out are the girls in middle school that would spend most of the class setting up their notes
Are you writing traditional or simplified? I started learning Mandarin with simplified because all the tutorials and apps are simplified. Any courses for traditional?
I don't think "Nobody" uses the font. It really depends on the stylistic application of the end user. If say you were using the style to apply to older Chinese operas/western opera, the "Serif" or "黑体" font would feel out of place. It's just less frequently used.
You can get a lot of kaiti ttf on the web. For free. Just download them and drag the files to your Fonts folder if you use Windows. (The procedure is similar in Mac)
true latin alphabet handwriting (the kind most europeans still learn, and most americans not anymore) is to difficult to read in small print and difficult to emulate in a font on a computer. At least chinese characters don't interact with eachother (as far as I know). while handwritten letters do change depending on it's place in a word. I see more and more people writing in computer letters these days though, something I've never really been good at. handwriting goes so much faster then writing every letter seperately, but I notice some people barely being able to read handwriting anymore. Influence of computers I guess. It is what it is. For chinese as a beginner it's much easier to deconstruct the characters in the different strokes with the older scripts. While languages in the latin alphabet are much easier to learn in modern typewriter or computer scripts, handwriten scripts is more difficult to deconstruct. But everyday handwriting is probably equally difficult in both writing systems :D .
Simplified is more useful since more people use it, but if you are learning to communicate in one of the areas that use traditional or like ancient Chinese culture, then learn traditional
Unfortunately, I don't think changing the system font is easy unless you're good with tech. Just check the learning Chinese programs/apps you're using and see if you can change it there!
I bet "gotta catch em all" is a meme of people trying to learn Mandarin characters and thinking they "gotta learn them all" I assume Chinese people are always learning new ones
The best fonts iare the rounded ones, anything else is just too aggressive on the eyes. Walking around in China pains me from all the awful lettering choices. Go to Japan, learn a thing or two about pleasant fonts, FFS.
As a graphic designer understanding this and the movements between Songti, kaiti is amazing and also as a beginner learned as of this month this is the best advice ever. Thank you 谢谢
Thank you for bringing this to our attention! It's a shame 楷体 fonts aren't as readily accessible in many apps, it looks so much more beautiful and authentic. Interesting engineering problem indeed.
Pleco has a 楷 font option in the stroke order view. I honestly don't know why they default to the 宋體 strokes.
@@microcolonel this option is only available after installing the free "KaiTi Stroke Order Diagrams" add-on.
I asked the developer about it since I noticed 過 was different between 宋体 and 楷体. Apparently one is a Taiwan variant, yet they still strangely have the same Unicode code point. There may be more issues like this that they've yet to check which is why it's still 'experimental'.
Just found your channel, the quality/sound/editing of this video in incredible. Looking forward to seeing more videos!
OMG thank you so much! I was trying to teach some people about writing in Chinese and I wanted to know that Chinese font that looks easy to understand strokes. It turned out to be Kaiti. Thank you so much again!
I am a Japanese-learning intruder (but I am also a language-geek, that's why I'm here) and personally I find the style you call kaiti so much better than the other two. The characters come to life to me, they are visible in every part, every stroke clear. I can also guess the stroke order of characters I don't know.
And this happens even if I am a beginner.
On the other hand, the kanas (the two Japanese syllabaries) are more readable in heiti. They look much more beautiful in kaiti but are more practical in heiti. That's just my sensation, of course, and, as I said, I'm just a beginner.
Heiti = Arial for Chinese
Songti = Times new roman for Chinese
Kaiti = Chinese for Chinese
I honestly like Songti font's design most, as it looks very formal and tame, but I agree that Kaiti is the definitive version of Chinese characters
Songti will be ugly if the font size is small (say, size under 12)
Kaiti would best be described as a cursive font.
i was thinking of courier new for songti, which is slab serif. kaiti is still times new roman like, serif. it is just that what we associate with serif is the more reserved fonts. there are a lot of different serif fonts with distinct styles.
I loved that you used lyrics from the song 童话 to show the comparison! I learned something new today.
I love it when someone gets my references!
@@ABChinese what does the word kung fu mean? Is it copyright? Can i use it ?
Thanks for the info! After watching your video, I realized I can change my Anki flashcards to Kaiti by changing the CSS to font-family:cursive. Apparently the font family of "sans-serif" maps to the OS's default Heiti font, "serif" maps to Songti, and "cursive" maps to Kaiti. It looks so much better now!
This is exceptionally useful. Thank you!
I think another good font family to practice from is FangSongTi! It’s like a combination of KiaTi and SongTi and mimics the way characters would look if written by pen. It’s great because it still retains the dynamic flow of KaiTi fonts. Sometimes due to the thickness of KaiTi fonts I find it hard to mimic with a pen so FangSongTi was a great alternative to help me get past that!
I totally agree with you that Kaiti is the best font for learning.
I really love Kaiti font a LOT. It' so beautiful.
I don't understand why it's not popular.
The problem is, on digital screens, you need to increase the font size in order to read Kaiti clearly.
On Mac, you generally need 14pt or larger size. On Windows, you might need 20pt or even more.
The other reason is computerized Kaiti font is not as “lively” as human-written. Designing with it looks much Comic-Sans-ish.
Heiti is for faster reading and clarity -- It is the equivalence of Helvetica-style font in the western world.
Your channel is really useful for me as a beginner! Ty so much!
Thanks for the advice!
Your English is amazing.
楷体 is beautiful but hard to read. I'll give it a try. Thanks for your explanation.
Although Kaiti is very nice, I'm sticking with my Heiti-style handwriting because of its clean readability (and im a student so its better in exams so that the markers can read my words easily)
There's a Chinese restaurant I pass every day as I walk into town called "名人客" - it annoys my silightly OCD mind as the first character in their sign is kaiti and the last two characters are heiti. I'm probably one of the few non-Chinese who even notice it!
Maybe some characters are missing in the font therefore they are replaced with the ones from the Fallback font.
Writing is very fan. I find it very very interesting than memorizing characters, basically because I suck at memorizing things. 😐 Thank for this genuine advice!
this helped me when I was practicing my strokes. 谢谢！
Correction: 宋体 came in the 明(Ming) dynasty. From my knowledge the fonts used printing in the song dynasty wasn't standardised, and it was only standardised in the Ming dynasty. However, the name of "Song宋体“ comes from the fact that printing began back then.
I prefer the heiti (sans serif) font by far, it just look way way better
I want to learn Chinese by myself. I use Kaiti (楷体) 16 pt when typing in Microsoft Word because it looks clear for me. I wonder what font size native Chinese speakers use when they type in Microsoft Word?
There are four main kinds calligraphy of Chinese : normal writing, slave writing, flowing writing and draft writing. 楷書，隷書，行書，草書。
Ik the reason why
Cs you need to know where to put pressure & where not thats so said from where to where to drive the pen/brush while writing the strokes... :) & for doing so you need to see first of all where is the start point on every stroke :)
Note that China and Taiwan use different Kaiti fonts on Windows, which are KaiTi and DFKai-SB. KaiTi has the Chinese standard which simplifies characters often, and it's more suitable to write horizontally. DFKai-SB has the Taiwanese standard which is the most strict Chinese writing standard in the world currently, it researches the source of characters and makes characters as distinguishable as possible, this font is more suitable to write vertically.
@@Levi_Highway More differences between the two fonts.
*DFKai-SB*
Periods (full stops), commas, and enumeration commas appear in the middle.
Latin alphabet characters are serif.
*KaiTi*
Periods (full stops), commas, and enumeration commas appear on the bottom left in horizontal text.
Periods (full stops), commas, and enumeration commas appear on the upper right in vertical text.
Latin alphabet characters are sans serif.
Italicizing vertical text in both fonts creates an unusual effect of making the characters slant downwards.
I use FZZhongKai-08 which supports only Traditional Chinese characters. It's a useful proofreading tool to spot any Simplified Chinese characters that may have crept into the text.
@@RaymondHng FZZhongKai-08 does not support Traditional Chinese, it displays Simplified Chinese in its most common way of traditional Chinese, this may cause many errors because Simplified Chinese often have two or three ways to write in Traditional Chinese.
There is also a 楷書 font from TW MOE that is quite good, and will be familiar to Taiwanese people. MS KaiTi has one nice added benefit: it also supports all common Japanese characters, including kana.
thank you! this was what I was looking for!
@@Levi_Highway That is incorrect. FZZhongKai-B08 does, in fact, support only Traditional Chinese characters on my Windows computer as a brush stroke font. If you try to format a Simplified Chinese character with FZZhongKai-B08 font, it displays the character as PMingLiU font. I use FZZhongKai-B08 font for all our Traditional Chinese text documents on our website.
張開雙手變成翅膀守護你~
at least i think thats how it goes
Great, I downloaded the Kaiti fonts, now I don't know what to do with it. How do you use it? Is there a anyone who know how? Please help.
Thanks for the information,i am learning hantse nearly one year and now thre months ago i started to wright them using bi mo yan zhi,and feels the real way to get a beautyfull whrigting. Hay xuyao name nuli,ke she wo bu zaihu......hao xuesheng nuli xuexi.... Xiexie ni de bangzhu,wo feichang gaoxing ni de shepin WAN SUI LAOSHE
You will go far yellow friend.
My brain loves the sanserif of Heiti. The older font styles seem cluttered and complicated to my mostly screen reading eyes. Maybe I'll learn Kaiti one day, but it isn't an urgent goal for my Chinese learning. 🤷
dodnt even realize !
nowander my primary textbook words/characters are nice bit those nicer wans are smaller or theres lesser of it ❤️👍
Ahh yes 楷体, as the Japanese call it 教科書体 because they use it in Japanese (the subject) textbooks. 黑体 is ゴシック体 and 宋体 is 明朝体.
I literally just realized the Mincho fonts were referring to the Ming Dynasty lol
Somewhat off topic.. what’s with the typed version of “a”? The only people I’ve ever known who write that type of “a” out are the girls in middle school that would spend most of the class setting up their notes
Thank you that was very useful
行楷 is more like daily written characters. Try to read these will good for your Chinese learning.
我以前学中文时都是用楷体的 后来才开始日常用黑体
Are you writing traditional or simplified? I started learning Mandarin with simplified because all the tutorials and apps are simplified. Any courses for traditional?
in fact learning only with kaiti is bad i said cause i do but luckily my teacher use this and a big chinese font and so it's better
bro how to make chinese font pinyin .. but no tones
Where to get it though..
Kaiti will not allow me to remember 元 as π with a macron because it doesn’t look as uniform as it
Thank you for showing me the error of my ways. What was I thinking?
PLEASEEEEEEEE
can you make a video on how to set Kaiti font on Pleco? I beg you, I can’t find out how to do it :((
Oh, it's easy... go to the left side menu and click on "Add Ons" and there should be a Kaiti Font option. Unfortunately they charge $5 for it😭😭😭
I don't think "Nobody" uses the font. It really depends on the stylistic application of the end user. If say you were using the style to apply to older Chinese operas/western opera, the "Serif" or "黑体" font would feel out of place. It's just less frequently used.
Very good 👏👏👏👏, I totally agree. Greetings from Brazil
Is it better to use fz-kai or tw-kai
Where can I download this font ?
我很爱楷体.
lovely greetings from germany ~
How can I get the kaiti fonts
It would be different depending on your program...
You can get a lot of kaiti ttf on the web. For free. Just download them and drag the files to your Fonts folder if you use Windows. (The procedure is similar in Mac)
You use kaiti because it's faithful to the source. I use kaiti because it looks the best in my opinion. We are not the same
I wouldn't turn into something you depicted!
Is there a way to Change the Chinese keyboard on iPhone?
the app look like has a giant s the app looks like that
I do love eastern mind in medicine and ___________.
true latin alphabet handwriting (the kind most europeans still learn, and most americans not anymore) is to difficult to read in small print and difficult to emulate in a font on a computer. At least chinese characters don't interact with eachother (as far as I know). while handwritten letters do change depending on it's place in a word. I see more and more people writing in computer letters these days though, something I've never really been good at. handwriting goes so much faster then writing every letter seperately, but I notice some people barely being able to read handwriting anymore. Influence of computers I guess. It is what it is.
For chinese as a beginner it's much easier to deconstruct the characters in the different strokes with the older scripts. While languages in the latin alphabet are much easier to learn in modern typewriter or computer scripts, handwriten scripts is more difficult to deconstruct. But everyday handwriting is probably equally difficult in both writing systems :D .
Should I learn simplified Chinese or traditional
Simplified is more useful since more people use it, but if you are learning to communicate in one of the areas that use traditional or like ancient Chinese culture, then learn traditional
@@ABChinese ok thank you
@@ABChinese if you don't mind me asking what type of Chinese do you speak
I speak Mandarin Chinese, and read simplified characters
@@ABChinese ok
Mostly East Asian languages including Japanese also used this font
Yes, but how can I change font in windows and android?
Unfortunately, I don't think changing the system font is easy unless you're good with tech. Just check the learning Chinese programs/apps you're using and see if you can change it there!
Sung-t'i (宋體) is actually called Ming-t'i (明體) in Taiwanese Republic of China.
And 明朝体 in Japan.
There is not such a place called "Taiwanese Republic of China" on the earth. It is called The Vassal Frog Island of Fujian province of China.
-300 social credit
@@reremouse1157 Republic of China is a sovereign nation since 1912.
I bet "gotta catch em all" is a meme of people trying to learn Mandarin characters and thinking they "gotta learn them all"
I assume Chinese people are always learning new ones
i kinda like the space aliens... 每個人已經不要寫字了。打字很快很容易
DengXian is also a decent font
楷体
黑体
宋体
I'd rather use Kaiti Font for the same reasons.
🙏
❤❤.
Please send to real Chinese, Chinese alphabet
The best fonts iare the rounded ones, anything else is just too aggressive on the eyes. Walking around in China pains me from all the awful lettering choices. Go to Japan, learn a thing or two about pleasant fonts, FFS.
66666
I need your help , i boutgh China iTunes and when i want to redeem the code he says i must have national id !!!? Please any help