Here are the Kanji I’ve been focusing on this week (level 11). To mix up the presentation, I’m showing off some free kanji fonts I downloaded. Jitai, one of the WaniKani addons, lets me mix up the font so I get used to seeing kanji in various styles and handwriting in my WaniKani drills. Since my goal is to read Japanese fairly well, this addon was a must for me to use. Plus it adds some unexpected fun to my drills, I never know what my kanji are going to look like!
I chose a variety of handwriting and typed fonts that appealed to me, and will showcase a few of my favorites. All are free to use and have links to the download in their titles.
How to Use these Fonts in WaniKani
To add these fonts, just download them, open up the font file, and there’s a button to install them. Then you open up your Jitai script and inside it will tell you where you can add your font names. Some of these are already added in the script, so will show up if you have them installed. Fire up your drills, and you’ll start seeing some fun, new fonts! (If this is too confusing, let me know, I’ll write up a detailed post on how to do it.)
Mushin Font
Below is a very blocky style, I can hardly recognize kanji characters that I’m used to seeing with slides and curves. It’s a handwritten font. I also added some sentence grammar I’ve learned this past week in NihongoMaster to this first image.
- Hiragana and Katakana
- Kanji (JIS Level 1 + 2)
- Numbers
- Symbols and Punctuation
Mamelon font
Somewhat similar to the above, but a more upright, rounded edge design.
- Hiragana and Katakana
- Kanji (JIS Level 2 + 15 kanji from IBM Extended)
- Numbers
- Symbols and Punctuation
Hoso fuwa font
Handwriting font written with a fine tip pen, cheerful style.
- Hiragana and Katakana
- Kanji (JIS Level 1)
- Numbers
- Symbols and Punctuation
KF Himaji font
Super cute, fun handwriting font! Hima (ひま) means spare time/leisure.
Note: The creator of this font states that you can’t use this font if you don’t know Japanese. http://www.kfstudio.net

KF Himaji
- Hiragana
- Katakana
- Alphanumeric
- JIS first standard kanji
- JIS second standard kanji
- Punctuations and symbols
- and more!
Aoyagi Reisho Font
Japanese calligraphy style font written by a famous calligrapher Aoyagi Kouzan. It may take me some practice figuring some of these out, but it looks pretty awesome.
- Hiragana and Katakana
- Alphanumeric
- Kanji (Level 1)
- Punctuations and symbols
Armed Banana font
This one is pretty crazy, I can barely recognize any of them! It is a pen writing style font. Very cool, but I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it, haha.
- Hiragana
- Katakana
- Alphanumeric
- Kanji (JIS Level 2)
- Punctuations and symbols
The default WaniKani font
Doing this post was more fun than I expected! Maybe I’ll show off other favorites I’ve been using in a later post. But I can’t stop until I’ve shown the default WaniKani font we are all familiar with.
Compare these to the above styles! Can you see the similarities? The differences?
Do you have a favorite font? Let me know!