What you see on this site will depend on the font settings of your browser I think. You can write it as a line or a dot, it just depends on your preference. The same happens in English, for example if you write a lower case "t", you can choose to curl the bottom of the character or you can leave it straight and make the character a look like a cross. Both are still legible and acceptable I think.

I should warn you now that if you ever start to read hand written Japanese, you're going to have to be a lot more tolerant of discrepancies. Sometimes it's worse than a doctor's handwriting.

The graders of the kanji kentei accept 3 forms of 言; the first stroke can be a horizontal line, a diagonal dot, or a vertical line.  Personally I learned to write it with a vertical line, and that's how I write it.

There are considerable differences between handwritten and printed Japanese.  Be on the lookout for them.

Hey thanks for the tips.

Obviously there are as many different fonts for writing Japanese as there are for English, so I've gone back (I'm only up to frame 352) and the fonts are different for the two examples given for each frame the whole way through, I just hadn't noticed

wrightak wrote:

I should warn you now that if you ever start to read hand written Japanese, you're going to have to be a lot more tolerant of discrepancies. Sometimes it's worse than a doctor's handwriting.

I'll take your advice wrightak, and up the tolerance level. I'm still brand new at this and the kanji aren't being gentle!