Do you think it's a good practice to learn writing hiragana using Gothic fonts?


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!




> 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.

