When I was searching for a mobile app that lets you practice writing hiragana,
I noticed that a lot of them uses the Gothic font, meaning that さ will be
written as 2 strokes and not 3. The most common font in educational textbook
uses さ with 3 strokes, and is the recommended font in Japan. So I want to ask
you guys something.

  1. Do you think this is a potential problem? Because I heard some beginners being confused with differences in さ,き and り on Gothic font and textbook font. I feel this can be distracting when starting to learn Japanese.

  2. If you are a teacher who wants to teach writing hiragana to a beginner, would you prefer an app that doesn't use Gothic font?

I am trying to develop an app regarding this problem. Any answer will help me
tremendously!
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readings orthography hiragana handwriting
Do you think it's a good practice to learn writing hiragana using Gothic fonts?
> I noticed that a lot of them uses the gothic font, meaning that さ will be
> written as 2 strokes and not 3.

That may be true, but with the Gothic (sans-serif) font I have always
considered the second stroke to be a two-part stroke. So while it's
technically only two strokes, I think of it as a character written with three
parts.

> Do you think this is a potential problem?

No, it's just a font thing. Some fonts will change the characters in different
ways, just like you see in English with the various ways to write lowercase
letter 'a.' It's just one more thing for a beginning Japanese learner to
learn.

Here's another post about font that you may find interesting: [Weird usage of
dakuten](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/49099/weird-usage-of-
dakuten/49101#49101).

> If you are a teacher who wants to teach writing hiragana to a beginner,
> would you prefer an app that doesn't use Gothic font?

I don't think that it matters too much, but most of the learning materials I
used to learn Japanese actually favored the Minchô (serif) font. It's not of
vital importance what font you use, so long as you are able to recognize the
characters involved.

Ultimately, the better you get at reading Japanese, the less various fonts
will trip you up. So I would recommend using a clean font to start, and
progressing from there. There's no need to hide from the various fonts,
because they'll pop up frequently.

That being said, however, since you are writing an app to help learners of the
language, I would personally suggest that you use the Minchô font. This is
because you will find that [most newspapers and books published in Japan use
the Minchô font.](https://jref.com/articles/hiragana-shapes.343/)

You may find this forum post on duolingo interesting as well: [Font Choice in
App](https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/22776824/Font-Choice-in-App).
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> Do you think this is a potential problem?

English has the same problem. Some Latin characters have typographical
variants, and especially **'g'** has a well-known ["double-story"
variant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G#Typographic_variants) that is usually
not used for handwriting. According to [this
article](https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fxhp0000532), English
speakers are almost unaware of this, but this is indeed a confusing problem to
people who learn English as the second language. So the variation of hiragana
should be a potential problem to beginners, too.

> If you are a teacher who wants to teach writing hiragana to a beginner,
> would you prefer an app that doesn't use Gothic font?

If you target beginners, don't use ゴシック. Instead, you should choose a font
designed for educational purposes.

  * [Is there an "official" font or other writing standard that should be used when teaching kanji?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/18782/5010)
  * [Font used to create handwriting worksheets by primary teachers to teach Hiragana](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/25345/5010)

Two-stroke さ would be understood, and it's even preferred in elegant cursive
script, but it's not something a beginner should start with.

Also note that there are many Japanese gothic fonts ("gothic" in this context
is essentially the same as "sans-serif"), and some gothic fonts have 3-stroke
さ.
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