Is Hiragana stroke order important?

I have taken print outs of Hiragana practice sheet that I found http://japanese-lesson.com/resources/pdf/characters/hiragana_writing_practice_sheets.pdf
and have started practice as I was having problem in recognizing the characters by just listening.

But the characters that they have are slightly different than what are shown on LingQ. So what’s the catch?

probably just a font change… just like you may have with roman letters.

This is what I see on LingQ: “あいうえお”
Do you think they are different from this?

As for the stoke order, following the order causes you no harm.

The font may be different but the characters are the same. No catch ^^

What you’re seeing is probably just a different font that looks more like handwriting than printed characters. The hiragana in the PDF look very legible to me (better than my own handwriting!).

But to answer your thread title, yes stroke order in Japanese (whether for kana or especially kanji) is very important. The stroke order has evolved over time to make writing the characters more fluid and come out natural-looking.

I can basically read hiragana letters at very natural speed at this point and I never bothered learning the stroke orders. I wasn’t worrying about writing when I learned them. It isn’t necessary.

You’ve decided to go after arabic as well as japanese? You must be a glutton for punishment.