Hi, I've been learning chinese these last six months. So far I've mostly used the system font in all apps and devices, so when I switch fonts I really struggle to recognize characters, even very familiar ones, but it's probably a very good exercise I think.
Anyways, just like with dislexia (I'm not dislexic) maybe the font can make a difference when learning new words. There's a reddit post that says so but eugh
Btw, I'm still not interested (right now) in practicing manually writing characters, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone yelled at me for not doing so.
楷体 is what they use for elementary schoolers. It's best to start from that. Do you know how strokes work? It seems like you're brute forcing recognizing characters without learning how they're composed if a font change makes recognizing them difficult. Like trying to memorize the spelling of english words without knowing the alphabet.
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%AC%94%E7%94%BB/3040863
Tbh I don't know how you expect to learn only how to read a language w/o knowing how to write it. If you're not gonna learn how to write at least learn a component based input method like 仓颉 or 五笔 so you're learning the actual composition of the characters. If you use PinYin (derogatory) you're literally never gonna learn how to read and write and your pronunciation's going to make zero sense because your brain subconsciously applies english spelling rules and it's not completely phonetically regular anyways.
Well I'm following the HelloChinese course which everyone reccomended, and it has a liiitle bit of writing exercises but it's negligible. I'm close to finish the main course and can read interesting-ish short stories.
I wanted to first be able to read and hear chinese fluently enough so I can start "immersing" with stories and eventually real immersing with social media/videos/television (cuz I'm not travelling to actual China anywhen soon sadly).
I knew I eventually would have to start practicing handwriting but right now feels better to no longer suffer when encountering a 就 in a text or audio than being able to elegantly write that character in the correct stroke order. Millions of illiterate people spoke chinese for millenia.
"I think someone having the literacy of a feudal peasant is cool and normal in 21st century China"
Get your orientalist bullshit out of here. You people only use this argument against Chinese and never any other language, when the writing system is integral to how the language and culture works more so than any other living language.