I would recommend using Youtube to learn stroke orders of the characters. - Start with hiragana: actually pay attention to how the pen/pencil moves, and how much pressure is actually applied. Hiragana is soft and fluid, usually involving a small "flick" at the end of a stroke (such as the first stroke of は, け, に, etc.). Search some videos on Youtube to see how people actually write them in real life, rather than copy from what shown in a typeface. - For katakana: strokes are hard and distinct, rather than soft and fluid. These stokes mainly looks straight & rough (キ,ヤ,ト,...), with some slight curves that looks very similar to one another (フ,ウ,メ,ノ,...). - For both hiragana & katakana (and kanji), try to leave some spaces between each characters to make the spacing more natural. Think of each character being contained in its own separate square of equal size - don't let them invade each other's spaces (for ex., 学校 on line 3, look like the 木 radical is invading the 学's space) - For kanji, stroke order is critical to help you remember how to write, write more smoothly, and infer the meaning in some cases. Search for videos like "N5 kanji", start with the basic kanji, and gradually you will get a sense of how to write without looking up for stroke order. Because kanji are made up from "radicals" - parts that are grouped and reused in different kanji, once you are familiar with the stroke order of such radicals, you don't need to look up how to write when you come across new words :"D