Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Create 'Sans Forgetica,' a Memory-Boosting Font (cnn.com)
OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: CNN reports on a new font that is purposely designed to more easily help students recall academic materials they read. From the report: "Australian researchers say their new font, called Sans Forgetica, could be the tool to help people retain information. The typeface, which slants to the side and has gaps in the middle, is not easy on the eyes. But according to the team at RMIT University in Australia who conceived Sans Forgetica, it has the perfect combination of 'obstruction' needed to recall information. The multidisciplinary team of typographic design specialists and psychologists said they designed Sans Forgetica using the learning principle called 'desirable difficulty.' The principle means that when obstruction is added to the learning process, people are required to make a little more effort and end up having better memory retention.
With normal fonts 'readers often glance over them and no memory trace is created,' RMIT senior lecturer Janneke Blijlevens said in a statement. Conversely, if a font is too difficult, memory is not retained. 'Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstruction has been added to create that memory retention,' she said. To get to that sweet spot, the researchers tested various fonts with roughly 400 Australian university students in a laboratory and an online experiment 'where fonts with a range of obstructions were tested to determine which led to the best memory retention,' RMIT said. 'Sans Forgetica broke just enough design principles without becoming too illegible and aided memory retention,' RMIT said."
With normal fonts 'readers often glance over them and no memory trace is created,' RMIT senior lecturer Janneke Blijlevens said in a statement. Conversely, if a font is too difficult, memory is not retained. 'Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstruction has been added to create that memory retention,' she said. To get to that sweet spot, the researchers tested various fonts with roughly 400 Australian university students in a laboratory and an online experiment 'where fonts with a range of obstructions were tested to determine which led to the best memory retention,' RMIT said. 'Sans Forgetica broke just enough design principles without becoming too illegible and aided memory retention,' RMIT said."
Darn snobbery. But at least the limit is only around 1800 glyphs for South Koreans.
Most Japanese limit themselves to Joyo kanji which is only just over 2000 to be considered literate. A couple extra hundred isn't that much more to learn by the time you're 17-18. Very few ever go beyond that let alone to get level 1 in Kanji Kentei which requires knowing over 6000 kanji plus obscure readings, etc.
It's not much more in modern Japanese--about 2200. Post World War II, the Japanese did massive simplification of kanji, cutting it back to 2000. While it's not generally illegal to use the older characters, it is illegal to use them in official documents, and publishers can only be assured that their readers will know the official characters (you're supposed to know them all by the end of elementary school).