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I've seen Japanese people write many letters/numbers "strangely". The most
common one is D which is written with a stroke like this _Đ_

[![Yutapon
font](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nFKQC.png)](http://www.freejapanesefont.com/yutapon-
coding-font-download/)

[![Yuta Coco
font](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QnrDv.png)](http://www.freejapanesefont.com/yuta-
coco-font-download/)

Why is that? Are there any other letters that are written differently from how
it's done in Western countries?

# Edit:

IIRC the **number 4** is also written with a longer vertical stroke because I
remember seeing Japanese people elongated foreign people's number 4 to make it
clearer. I suppose because they think it's similar to Katakana ム?

Note that **I do know that Japanese people don't write`7` with the horizontal
stroke like the above font** but with a hook above, because when I first
learnt the language my teacher told me that they don't understand what that
is. I did hear Japanese people asking what that ~~7~~ symbol is, or confirm if
it's the number 7 when they're familiar with foreign handwriting.

And there are non-programming versions without the stroke on 0 as well:

[![G7 Cute Pop Bold](https://www.freejapanesefont.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/09/G7-cute-pop-bold-
full.png)](https://www.freejapanesefont.com/g7-cute-pop-bold-download/)

[![Aqua Font](https://www.freejapanesefont.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/aquafont.png)](https://www.freejapanesefont.com/aqua-
font/)

More examples can be found on
<https://www.freejapanesefont.com/category/handwriting/>
CC BY-SA 4.0
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handwriting rōmaji
Why is D written as Đ in Japanese handwriting?
I am not sure this is concrete enough to be considered an answer, but I will
post here.

I've never seen this "D" before in Japanese fonts; it definitely is not
common.

I assume that it is purely a stylistic choice. Whoever wrote that probably did
not know that is a different letter, but only saw it as a "cool-looking D".
Kind of like how English speakers playfully use "я" in place of "R", even
though they are completely different letters.
CC BY-SA 3.0
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Not sure if that's **the** explanation but I found [this
page](http://blogs.itmedia.co.jp/yohei/2007/06/post_76a9.html) which seems to
suggest adding various strokes to letters to ensure they're not confused for
other similar-looking (especially to the Japanese eyes) ones, similar to how
some fonts use [slashed zero](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero) to
distinguish it from the letter O.

[![Latin letters with
strokes](https://i.stack.imgur.com/H77kg.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/H77kg.jpg)

BTW, I did a similar thing while at university: in quick handwriting it may be
difficult to distinguish m from w or n from u (and especially in [Russian
cursive](https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/1552/why-does-
italic-%D1%82-look-like-m), ш from т and и from п), so I often added bars
above or below those letters in my notes to reduce confusion.
CC BY-SA 3.0
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You're probably working as programmer or accountant, or you won't actually see
many people in Japan write in this style, because those slashes are added to
reduce misreading possibility in quick handwriting. For what it's worth, I
rarely write letters like this myself.

Here is a more complete example from [the
font](http://net2.system.to/pc/font.html).

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VI80L.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VI80L.png)

Who made it is clearly a programmer (see the link). It's their style to put
slashes on 0, 7, D, O (top bar), and Z to make sure they wouldn't misread the
source code (broadly speaking, serifs of I are the same kind).

If you ask why it's _allowed_ to write letters like this, the reason will be
that Japanese are a sort of people who only recognize the [basic
alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_basic_Latin_alphabet), i.e.

> A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Of course, Vietnamese people wouldn't please with the use of Đ, as much as
Polish people frown on Ƶ (they are different letters in their alphabets).
Moreover, Turkish people wouldn't agree with _i_ being the lower case of _I_
in the first place. Even not as extreme as this, people write letters [in more
or less different ways around the
world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_handwriting_variation). The
Latin letters' world is diverse.
CC BY-SA 3.0
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