Hm, I hadn’t noticed that. OK, I see it now. I’m reading a light novel that also has this sort of slight shrinking and it’s a strange thing to get used to.
EDIT: Yep, you were right. My bad.
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Speaking of tiny kana, my italki tutor recommended me this cool manga called 「日本人の知らない日本語」, which I just started but it’s been a fun read. It took me way too long to realize that squiggly question-mark-looking symbol in the last caption was ァ…
Also, if this image is correct, I’m the brokest Arab to ever try to learn Japanese. 
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Not sure what you mean by “correct.”
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I wasn’t being serious, really. Just when the author mentioned an Arab prince as a student of Japanese, I found it a little funny that I’m a broke Arab teacher reading this manga.
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I see.
Considering it also said 超個性的, it’s kind of making the point that they’re not the typical students of Japanese, so I was a little confused by what you meant.
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Oh, I misunderstood. I thought it was implying that those learners were stereotypes of some sort. This has clearly not been my day.
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That’s such a subtle difference that you wonder whether it even feeds into the reading process. The other place I find つ vs っ can be hard to distinguish is furigana, just because of the tiny font size.
(Historical kana usage didn’t have small-kana at all; another reason to be grateful for the spelling reform :-))
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Well, in most novels (that I’ve read at least), they use つ for furigana regardless of whether it’s つ or っ. So they are hard to distinguish because they are literally indistinguishable.
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Heh, I had kinda wondered if that was the case (or if it was the case for some publishers and not others). But I read on paper so can’t conveniently magnify and cross-compare the size of the print 
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Fair enough. I convert my ebooks to HTML for later reference, so I can easily tell they are the same character. I think I’ve only read one book/series where they used the small っ in furigana: 魔法少女育成計画.
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That’s a small つ, no? えっけん えつけん
It looks smaller to me. Are there other examples where it’s a normal つ in furigana?
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No, thats a regular tsu. You already proved it by typing both out, but I edited the file and put a small tsu in side by side so you can see the difference
I mean, yeah, it just depends on the book. Heres another interesting example
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Here’s an example from 魔法少女育成計画, which as I said earlier does actually differentiate. You can clearly see the difference in this case.
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Also the furigana on top of 人類種 is イマニテイ with full size イ (I suppose it is to be read as イマニティ)
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I didn’t even notice. 
It took me some time to realize it isn’t にゃや…
And how could you pronounce it other than にゃ ?
My newest tangentially-Japanese fixation is Fontworks, a Japanese type foundry. Some of the fonts do some interesting stylization, like 新豪龍. I plugged in the ALC sentence 「私は目標が達成できないのではないかと気持ちが萎えている。」 (which is depressingly appropriate with the way my progress has gone this week)…
I’ve never seen 気 drawn to look like it has the hat radical before.
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