when I was teaching myself to write kana, I copied the way they looked in many books and websites. then one day some Japanese friends told me "well that's ok but it looks like how they sometimes write kana in manga. few Japanese people do it that way. the normal way is like this..." and then they proceeded to write some kana with important differences from what I had taught myself.
for example, when you write hiragana "ki", it's four strokes not three as it appears in most computer and book fonts. the downstroke (3rd stroke) is like a backwards "L" and then the 4th stroke is a curved line under the other 3 strokes. books and computer fonts tend to merge the 3rd and 4th strokes. similar situation with hiragana "sa" and "chi". And apparently few people throw in those little flourishes or hooks at the end of many strokes either when they write. it seems that's a calligraphy-style accentuation that doesn't often occur in normal handwriting.
I've been looking for learning materials that show how Japanese people really usually write the kana, but unfortunately most web-based materials seem to have been created by a graphic designer who imported a font from a dictionary and built an animation based on that which doesn't reflect real handwriting of people who are not calligraphers or manga authors. for some reason this isn't caught by the people in charge of putting the website together. we seem to have the same issue here:
http://www.japanesepod101.com/learningc ... gana_chart
I imagine people do things this way because it allows you to get a very clean-looking kana for animation and you don't have to go to the trouble of scanning real handwriting. personally I'd rather see a less clean and less perfectly standardized kana that's a real person's handwriting so I can learn how to write like an average person instead of like a manga artist. When a Japanese friend saw my kana she decided to mail me a children's kana learning exercise book all the way from Tokyo so I'd have a text that showed the way people learn to write kana in school. I guess that means learning to write natural kana instead of dictionaryesque kana is really a significant issue since she went to so much trouble!
to this site's credit, the hiragana "ne", "wa", and "re" are another set that would be easy to animate in a way not reflecting common handwriting practices if you based them on a dictionary or computer font, but they are done well on this site. in other words they look like they're made up of 3 strokes in many fonts but are actually written by people as 2 strokes, and that's how the videos on this site show them.
it would be awesome to get a full set of videos that reflect how people really write. some of the existing ones on this site, while perhaps not really incorrect, will make students look like they learned from an odd source.
