33579
In English, you often see people who write certain letters or numbers with an
extra stroke to differentiate them from similar characters, for example people
will write a [z with a horizontal
stroke](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Latin_alphabet_Z_with_stroke.svg)
to differentiate between "z" and "2". Similarly 7 is sometimes written with a
horizontal line through it to differentate it from the number 1. There is also
the [slashed zero / dotted zero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero)
to cleanly differentiate 0 (`0`) from O (`O`).

I often have a lot of trouble clearly writing certain pairs in a cleanly
distinguished way, for example, シ and ツ, ソ and ン, and to a much lesser extent
the pairs ユ and コ and サ and せ. Is there a standard variant form for these
characters, or do you just annotate it with its counterpart from the other
kana when you want to be absolutely clear about it, like [シ]{し}?

There is a [related
question](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/2990/distinguishing-
certain-characters-in-handwriting-and-print-similar-looking-kana) about
distinguishing certain kanji from similar-looking kana, but that is not a
problem I've really had.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-04-15T03:48:04.333
33578
2016-04-15T04:01:04.590
12091
question
orthography kana
Is there a standard way to clearly differentiate similar handwritten (kana) characters?
This is one of the reasons why stroke order can be important. When looking at
handwritten characters, you can get a sense for what each one is even if it's
relatively illegible by looking at the direction and order of the strokes.

Characters like シ and ツ can be written by hand in a way that very clearly
indicates which it is: write シ with clearly horizontal strokes aligned along
the left edge and ツ with clearly vertical strokes aligned along the top edge.

[![シ and
ツ](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wQHEv.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wQHEv.png)

You can follow a similar convention with ソ and ン.

ユ and コ should be clearly distinguishable. In ユ the stroke goes to the middle
and the second along the bottom. In コ the first stroke goes well to the right
and the second not only meets the first at its rightmost edge but also does so
slightly above the bottom of the first stroke.

With せ and サ this is just a matter of remembering which is which. You wouldn't
really confuse them in normal use since one is hiragana and the other
katakana.

And finally, all confusion should be solved by context. If a word you're
looking at only works with one possibility, that's probably what it is.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-04-15T04:01:04.590
33579
2016-04-15T04:01:04.590
1797
33578
answer