Anki Japanese Font Showing Chinese Characters: How to Fix It
You open your Anki deck, start reviewing, and something looks off. The kanji on your cards don’t look quite right. Some strokes are in the wrong place, some characters look vaguely foreign even when you’ve studied them before. You’re not imagining it. Your cards are displaying Chinese character variants instead of Japanese ones.
This is one of the most common Anki problems for Japanese learners, it’s almost always caused by older decks, and it’s fixable in about five minutes.
Table of Contents
Why This Happens
Japanese and Chinese share thousands of characters that use the same Unicode code point. Unicode is the system computers use to store text, and for historical reasons, Japanese and Chinese versions of the same character are stored as one entry rather than two. The actual visual shape of each character is handled by the font.
When Anki doesn’t know whether to render a character in its Japanese or Chinese form, it makes a guess based on your system or the deck’s font settings. On many systems, especially Windows, that guess defaults to the Chinese variant.
The result: a character like 直 (なお) or 海 (うみ) might render with slightly different strokes than the Japanese form you’d see in any textbook.
This doesn’t affect how the cards work. But if you’re learning to write, or you’re trying to match what you see in study materials, it matters. And it’s distracting.
The most common culprit is older decks, particularly Core 2k/6k, which were built before this became a known issue in the community. Newer decks handle it correctly from the start.
The Fix (Desktop)
Open Anki on your computer. The fix lives in the card template, specifically the Styling section.
Step 1: Click “Browse” in the main Anki toolbar, or press B on your keyboard. This opens the card browser.
Step 2: Find any card from the affected deck in the left panel and click it once to select it.
Step 3: At the top of the browser window, click the “Cards…” button. This opens the card template editor, which has three sections: Front Template, Back Template, and Styling.
Step 4: Click on the Styling tab.
Step 5: Look for a line that says font-family. It might look something like this:
css
.card {
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
}Step 6: Replace the font-family value with a Japanese-specific font. Any of these work:
css
.card {
font-family: "Noto Serif JP", "Yu Mincho", "Hiragino Mincho ProN", "MS PMincho", sans-serif;
}The fonts are listed in order of priority. Anki uses whichever one is installed on your system. Noto Serif JP is a free Google font available on any operating system. Yu Mincho is built into Windows 10 and later. Hiragino Mincho ProN is built into macOS. Having all four listed means the fix works regardless of which operating system you’re on.
Step 7: Click Save and close the template editor.
Your cards will now render using the Japanese font variant. Flip through a few cards to confirm the characters look right.
The Alternative Fix: Add lang="ja" to Your Template
If you’re comfortable editing HTML, there’s a second approach that works alongside or instead of the font fix. It tells the browser explicitly that the text is Japanese, which triggers Japanese glyph rendering regardless of which font is active.
In the Front Template (and Back Template if your Japanese text appears there too), find where your Japanese field appears. It’ll look something like {{Expression}} or {{Front}} or whatever your deck’s field is named.
Wrap it like this:
html
<div lang="ja">{{Expression}}</div>Both fixes together are the most reliable combination. The lang="ja" attribute handles any characters the font preference might miss, and the font setting ensures visual consistency across your cards.
The Fix on Android (AnkiDroid)
AnkiDroid doesn’t always inherit font changes you make in the desktop template. If your cards still look wrong on your phone after making the desktop fix, do the following.
Open AnkiDroid and go to Settings (the three-dot menu or gear icon). Tap Display, then look for Default font or Override font. You’ll need a Japanese font file installed on your device to select here.
The easiest option: download the Noto Serif JP or Noto Sans JP font file (available free from Google Fonts), copy it to your device’s storage, and then point AnkiDroid to it in the font settings. It’s a few extra steps but it solves the problem permanently.
The Fix on iPhone (AnkiMobile)
AnkiMobile handles fonts differently. The app picks up the Japanese font if you’ve installed one at the system level on your iPhone. In practice, this usually isn’t necessary on iOS because Apple’s built-in fonts (the Hiragino family) handle Japanese rendering correctly by default.
If you’re still seeing Chinese variants on iOS after applying the template fix, check that the lang="ja" tag is in your template. That typically resolves it.
While You’re In There: Consider Switching Decks
If you’re using Core 2k/6k and running into font problems, it’s worth knowing that the community has largely moved on from that deck. The current recommended beginner vocabulary deck is Kaishi 1.5k, which was built with modern Anki conventions including proper Japanese font handling baked in.
Kaishi 1.5k covers the 1,500 most common Japanese words, uses sentence cards rather than isolated vocabulary, and comes with audio and clean card design. It doesn’t have the font bug because it was designed after the community recognized the problem.
If you’re early in your study, switching now saves you from debugging other issues later. You can download Kaishi 1.5k for free from AnkiWeb.
Why do some kanji look different in Japanese versus Chinese?
The same Unicode character can have slightly different visual forms depending on regional convention. Strokes that curve one way in Japanese might curve differently in Chinese, or some strokes might be connected or separated differently. The shapes aren’t dramatically different, but to someone learning Japanese, the “wrong” variant is genuinely confusing when it doesn’t match what textbooks show.
Does this affect my study results?
No. The underlying card content is the same. This is purely a display problem. Your reviews count normally, your intervals aren’t affected, and your learning data is intact. It’s just an annoying visual bug that’s worth fixing so you’re learning the correct written forms.
I changed the font but it still looks wrong. What else can I check?
A few possibilities. First, the font you specified might not be installed on your system. Check the list of fonts in the Styling section and make sure at least one is available on your device. Second, if you’re using AnkiDroid or AnkiMobile, the desktop template change doesn’t always carry over automatically. Follow the mobile-specific steps above. Third, some decks have multiple note types, and the fix needs to be applied to each one separately.
What’s the difference between Noto Serif JP and Noto Sans JP?
Serif fonts have small decorative strokes at the ends of lines (think the font in a printed book). Sans-serif fonts don’t (think the font in most apps). Noto Serif JP is closer to how Japanese is typically written in formal contexts and textbooks. Noto Sans JP is cleaner and easier to read at small sizes on screen. Either one fixes the Chinese character problem. Use whichever you find more readable.
Will this fix work on all my decks?
The font change only applies to the specific note type you edited. If you have multiple decks using different note types, you’ll need to apply the fix to each one. Go to Browse, filter by the affected deck, open Cards…, and repeat the process. It takes about two minutes per deck.
Once you’ve confirmed your cards are showing the right glyphs, do a quick pass through your most-reviewed cards. If you’ve been drilling incorrectly rendered characters for a while, a handful of them might look different now, and that’s a good sign, not a problem. You’re seeing what you were always supposed to see.
