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The first is supposed to be the kanji for mouth, "くち" and the sencond is
supposed to be katakana. When I typed them in google translate, the sizes were
different so I could differentiate them that way, but now just like in the
title, they look exactly the same. How do people tell the diffence when
reading?
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2013-12-11T19:01:52.527
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kanji orthography kana
口ロ Those are supposed to be different characters. How can you tell?
Context.

In theory, you can usually tell the difference based on minor details such as
their size. But there's considerable variation in fonts and handwriting, and
because both ロ and 口 have the same stroke order they can look pretty similar,
so in practice this can be difficult.

Luckily, you generally don't have to distinguish between them visually because
you can almost always tell from context. For example, words like 出口 and 入り口
contain the kanji, and words like ゲロゲロ and ローマ contain the kana.

You can learn to read Japanese fairly well without necessarily being able to
distinguish the two characters as written in your question title. (At least in
the font I'm using, they're pretty hard to tell apart.)

In my opinion, the similar-looking ones you should learn to tell apart
consistently are ones where the stroke order or position is different, like ン
versus ソ, シ versus ツ, 人 versus 入, or 天 versus 夭, or the ones where the stroke
lengths are different, like 土 versus 士, or 未 versus 末.
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2013-12-11T19:25:56.670
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2013-12-11T20:54:47.707
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Consider it analogous to the characters for capital "o" and zero. You just
have to use context. Without context, such as randomly generated passwords,
you're out of luck.

kanji = 才; kana = オ;  
kanji = 力: kana = カ;  
kanji = 夕: kana = タ;  
kanji = 二; kana = ニ;  
kanji = 工; kana = エ;
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2013-12-11T19:43:53.713
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