Raichu Wrote:Strangely I had no trouble learning either hiragana or katakana. But I still have trouble with similar looking characters, esp. ソ vs ン and ツ vs シ. What came over them to invent characters like that I don't know.

I had a -lot- of trouble with those at first... I still have trouble if I look at them and -try- to remember... But if I just glance, it just pops into my head now. Yay for rote memorization!

It's okay, though... We aren't the only ones to have trouble with those. There are quite a few posts on the internet about it, and even at least 1 here. (That thread has a lot of helpful tips in it, too!)

kfmfe04 Wrote:The second stroke in ソ is a downstroke, while in ン, it is an upstroke.
Also, the positioning of the strokes are different: ソ is kind of top-heavy while ン is left-heavy.
Similar things can be said of ツ vs シ.

I never had difficulty learning them in the first place. Those differences are quite evident when handwritten and also when displayed with mincho which my school textbooks and dictionaries used. However, with gothic fonts now becoming more prevalent, it's only subtle differences in angle of the strokes that distinguishes them.

With my eyesight getting blurier with age, I'm having other problems too. There was a roman R in some Japanese I was reading recently, and I couldn't figure out what a 尺 was doing there!