I have just discovered the Genkier podcast and it has been kind of a revelation. Very, very helpful and I am sorry to see that it only goes up to Chapter 5 in Genki I. I have donated to the site and you should really find a way to monetize this; YesJapan, for example, appears to make decent money and I don't find that nearly as useful.
Question: as I thumb through books (notably Oxford Japanese Grammar and Verbs) and some sites on the Internet, I see in words rendered in hirigana the character "ri" being rendered as "リ" instead of "り". What's up with that?
外国人さん、はじめまして！
Some fonts connect the two vertical strokes, and some don't. "Cursive" (imitating calligraphy) forms of the hiragana will keep the connection (imitating someone not pulling the brush completely up off the paper as they move it from the bottom of the first stroke to the top of the second), while "block" type fonts will break the connection. You will see both forms in handwriting, though not connecting them is probably more common.
When the two strokes aren't connected, they will usually show a small "hook" at the bottom of the first stroke, indicating that the brush left the paper on its way up to the top of the second stroke. Katakana characters will commonly not have that hook. Note that even the hiragana characters may not show the hook in highly stylized forms.
Thanks -- it didn't even occur to me that they might be the same letter in a different font.