I’ve been picking up steam in learning Japanese and finally have a good balance of utilizing WaniKani to learn Kanji, some textbooks for grammar, and some elementary stories for reading. I’m planning to move to Tokyo in 3-5 years so that’s my goal to as fluent as I possibly can be. I also would love to be able to play video games in Japanese.
My question is, with the dominance of writing on computers (with the ability to select the Kanji based on the hiragana typed), would there be any value for me in learning how to write Kanji? I can imagine it would help slightly with memorization, but I already have a fairly strong memory. I’d rather not spend a lot of time learning to write it when it isn’t congruent with my goals.
You didn’t describe anything in your plans that would require kanji writing proficiency, unless “fluent as possible” includes the concept of being able to sit down and write an essay by hand even though you won’t ever have to.
When it comes to real-life writing situations, like filling out a form at a government office, there’s basically always plenty of time to copy from your phone, so the ability to write from memory quickly is not required.
I say all of this as someone who has spent probably thousands of hours practicing writing simply because I enjoy it.
Adding slightly to the already excellent reply. There will be some things that you will find you need to write by hand if you are going to live here as there are a lot of forms that need to be filled out as you navigate life and work. So it can be useful to just learn (memorize in isolation) some of the common ones, like your address, company name, etc… On the other hand, I have never had a problem with filling in any those sections on various forms purely in hiragana (some forms actually ask for it to be in hiragana only) so…
But if you have the time and can, go for it. I wish I did/could.
While I agree with everything the others already wrote, you might want to practice writing anyway If you don’t want to feel like an elementary school child everytime you are asked to fill out a questionnaire. There won’t be many occasions but everytime they happen, it feels bad. Wouldn’t stress too much on it though
I’d recommend learning how to write if you plan on living in Japan long term. Sure, it comes up every now and then, not just in forms but recreation as well, but more importantly I think it deepens your understanding of the kanji and helps get them in your head for good, especially as you learn a bunch that differ by a single radical. There’s thousands of kanji and inevitably some will slip through the cracks from time to time, so adding some muscle memory to them will help them stay in your head longer.
If you were departing within the year and trying to maximize your ability within that timeframe, fine, it’s a totally reasonable corner to cut and many people do. But from the sounds of it, you could potentially live in Japan for a while, presumably want to live like a regular person, and have 3-5 years to prepare. Writing out a bunch of kanji is nice activity anytime you’re too tired for mentally-intensive study like grammar acquisition, and gives you one more shared experience with everyone who grew up in Japan.
Aside from what everyone else is saying (which I agree with), I’ve found that the more kanji I learn, the more practicing writing helps me to distinguish and memorize them. So if you get into the habit now, you might see it pay off in your future studies.
Did you know that, even though Japanese people learn to write 2000 kanji throughout school, most adults eventually forget how to write them? There are plenty of videos on YouTube asking natives to write high school or N1 kanji, and while they usually get pretty close, they miss a few strokes or mix up some radicals. So, since it’s a skill that even most natives don’t possess, I think it’s safe to assume a foreigner wouldn’t need it.
One useful thing about it though, is that it’s good practice for differentiating similar kanji. It’s also good to have a general understanding of stroke order, because, like previously stated, you’ll have time to copy from your phone, but if your stroke order is wrong your kanji can become hard to read. So while recalling from memory isn’t necessary, it will be helpful if you’re able to deduce the stroke order of a kanji just from looking at it.
Tldr it’s probably not useful enough to justify spending too much time on it.
Maybe you didn’t mean it this way, but this seems to imply that they forget how to write everything. The typical adult has no problem jotting notes on everyday stuff. If they get a kanji slightly wrong on a note, it doesn’t really matter, the same way it doesn’t matter if you misspell a word here or there.
My point is just that even though they don’t retain 100% of what they were exposed to in school, adults can still sit down and have no trouble writing most of what they need to in their lives.
I believe Japanese people when they say they can’t write just about as much as when they say 日本語上手！
I’ve heard many people say that once they know how to write a kanji, they can never forget it. When there are 2 kanji I’ve learned that are visually very similar and I keep mixing them up, I’ll write out both of them so I can “feel” the difference between them.
Personally, I would recommend trying to write each kanji you learn 5x each (you don’t need to write it over and over until you memorize it).
Also, any time you are writing some kind of composition in Japanese while you’re doing textbook study, try to challenge yourself to write out at least some of the kanji in the sentence that you know instead of just using hiragana.
You don’t need to stress about perfect proficiency, but I don’t think you should completely overlook the usefulness of writing as another way of solidifying your memory for kanji.
This is not serious research data it’s just some edited clickbait that the algorithm will keep feeding you if you start watching it, nothing more than entertainment, so declaring “most natives don’t possess” is quite a jump. You only need to watch one “The earth is flat” video in order for the algorithm to feed you all the rest of those and it would seem like there are many. It’s just an illusion that creates an echo chamber and sadly with enough exposure will make you think it’s real.
There are more Japanese people who don’t participate in those silly videos but you don’t really know about them…
Like others have said before me, it can help with similar looking kanji, and in everyday life on occasions. I would also add that being able to write when technology fails is essential, just like having an emergency kit so you might want to take this into consideration if you are planning to live in Japan.
I watched a video where an American was asked to name 3 countries not in North America and they said “Africa, Asia, and South America” after taking a long time to think.
As you can see, us Americans learn what a “country” is in school, but most of us no longer possess the knowledge when we grow up.
I’d disagree. My stance is basically what leebo said where if there’s something you want to be able to do involving writing or you just enjoy writing them you should do it, otherwise don’t bother.
Assuming you’re not writing them, Kanji are relevant to you only through reading them. I’ve personally lived in Japan for 3 years now and been studying for quite a bit longer than that and read a lot. Can’t really say I’ve ever felt like my knowledge wasn’t “deep enough”. The thing about using your knowledge is that if there’s a deficiency in it then you should realize it and it will naturally get patched up. Reading just demands a much less “deep” understanding because it doesn’t really matter. You have context to help. And in the situations where even context isn’t always enough you’ll naturally learn to distinguish the things you need to distinguish.
The brain is really good at optimizing and figuring out problems it sees a lot.
I totally agree that reading is far and away the primary way that you engage with kanji, and figured that it being a higher priority goes without saying. Deliberately slowing your kanji acquisition so you can master the strokes before moving to the next character would be unproductive. I also think if you were to attain a level of fluency roughly equivalent to your mother language, being unable to write a single kanji would be both a practical hindrance and a meaningful deficiency. Those are obviously the polar extreme hypotheticals, but for all of us in the middle, it means there’s a suitable amount of writing knowledge/ability depending on the person’s goal.
For me, also years into living here, that means being able to leave a note on a desk or door, draw up plans on paper in a group, anything using the first thousand kanji or so, without making everyone wait while I pull out my phone. Would it be the worst thing if I couldn’t? Of course not. But I would find it unfitting for my level speaking and reading-wise.
Anyway, I basically agree with what you said, just wanted to clarify my point. My advice was based specifically on what I understand OP’s goals and timeframe to be (though I could be wrong). For most I would give very different advice.
I think the advice above is very good.
I don’t allot much time to writing but I think I should do some from my current level (or a few levels back) to help make unfamiliar Kanji stick better.
Another item on my to-do list, is to learn how to write my Japanese address in Kanji reasonably quickly, neatly, and correctly.
That’s fair. I mean I would be lying if I said that there were no situations where I could use writing Kanji in my daily life. Its just really easy to get around it for better or worse. I mean nowadays people are able to get by living in Tokyo without learning Japanese at all and can exist in their English bubble. Not that I’m advocating for that necessarily (though I dont particular think it’s wrong either), but it does really show that different people are cool with different sized spheres of capability and you can make do one way or another.
In a way, I think the people who should learn to write naturally end up just learning to write. And the people who don’t just don’t. Same goes for learning Japanese in general. People who are going to learn and be successful usually don’t need to be convinced or have the reasons laid out for them. They just feel a natural pull or recognize the necessity and so they end up doing it.
Did it for 2 years. Was a great experience and completely unnecessary. However, I have no worries when I write on documents or papers now. I forget how to write a lot of kanji, but not how to write… If that makes any sense.
Anecdotal evidence of character amnesia is plentiful, but there has been insufficient scientific study of the phenomenon.[1][13][14][15] There are, however, a few surveys which reinforce the claim that character amnesia exists among users of written Chinese and Japanese. China Youth Daily surveyed 2,072 people in April 2010 and found that 83 percent reported having trouble writing characters. A similar Dayang Net survey found that 80 percent of respondents acknowledged having forgotten how to write some characters.[10] In 2008 the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China conducted a survey of 3,000 teachers, where sixty percent complained of declining writing ability.[16] Another anecdotal example can be seen during a spelling bee show hosted on CCTV in 2013, where only 30% of participants were able to write “toad” (Chinese: 癞蛤蟆; pinyin: Làiháma) in Chinese.[17][18]
While some claim that text messaging is the primary cause of character amnesia,[10] the phenomenon, at least in Japan, appears to have originated with the widespread use of word processors. An article in The Asahi Shimbun from 23 September 1985 reports that students found it increasingly difficult to remember how to write even quite simple kanji by hand since the full-scale introduction of word processors at a university campus in Isehara.[19] A 1993 survey of members of the Information Processing Society of Japan found that habitual word processor users reported declining ability to write characters by hand.[11] The Japanese term “word-processor idiot” (ワープロ馬鹿, wāpurobaka) describes a person whose handwriting ability has deteriorated due to overreliance on computer input methods.[20]
To add my own anecdote, I have been practicing writing kanji side by side with WaniKani since basically day 1, I have handwritten hundreds of thousands of characters over the past couple of years and yet I sometimes end up being unable to draw a super common kanji that I read all the time. I failed reviews for 対 and 掛 recently, I also often mess up 解 for instance. I read all those characters effortlessly on a daily basis.
Naturally a native Japanese person would have had orders of magnitude more practice than me but if you took a sample of educated Japanese people who basically never handwrite anything anymore (something that must not be too uncommon these days) it really wouldn’t surprise me at all if many failed to draw semi-common kanji correctly first try from memory.
Interestingly the above Wikipedia article mentions that this phenomenon had positive aspects as well:
A parallel phenomenon has appeared involving the increased use of input methods to write Chinese characters and the difficulty of remembering such a large set of characters. The use of word processors allows the user to write using characters that the user does not remember how to write by hand. This resulted in the reappearance in the 1980s in Japan of complex older characters which had been removed from the official lists. The number of characters available for use on a word processor far exceeds the number of characters a person can readily remember how to write by hand.[11] While many have blamed the use of input methods for difficulty remembering how to write the characters by hand, widespread use of input methods may be responsible for a reversal in the decline of kanji use in Japan.[12]
I didn’t say the phenomenon doesn’t exist, it was more about being cautious with giving advice based on anecdotal entertainment. It’s the same with how a lot of people wouldn’t be able to tell you the actual phone numbers their smartphones dial when they text (`cause making a call is not a thing anymore?), but you gotta admit that statistically 3000 when it comes to China is like surveying an empty room because numbers… lol (not that funny when I’m the one that statistically doesn’t count but that’s the way statistics works)
Also with the massive simplification revision of characters that was made in China over the years, it’s hard to tell what’s really going on there. But I’m the last person to have an opinion here since my knowledge of their history is quite minimal.
Isn’t it the same with english with less common words? Not to mention the influence of predictive text and auto correct. Still, I can only assume that knowing the basics is still a thing.
I can tell you that the company my partner works in decided to change the program they use for their entire logistics to a newer one. So they did. I asked my partner if they were going to leave at least one terminal with the old one just in case, because they still need to run a massive operation and if the new program will fail to deliver for some reason they won’t have anything to fall on. They didn’t. Not even one. Guess who had to work with pens and papers for months afterwards. No joke.
So of course there are instances where it’s not that important and people can live in a bubble where they don’t even need to know the language of the place they immigrate to, but the idea of blindly trusting tech and not being self sufficient or at least have some basic skills just in case, it’s either hubris or pure ignorance.
I’m definitely experiencing autocorrect-dependency with my native French. I had to look up the conjugation for arrêter (to stop) the other day because I couldn’t remember how to spell one of the forms. Obviously when I was in school in the 90s and wrote everything by hand (in cursive!) all the time I probably wouldn’t have had this issue.
But if anything I would argue that it reinforces what we’re saying in this thread: if educated natives themselves rely heavily on technology to spell for them there’s no shame in doing the same thing as a foreigner.
I’m spending a lot of time learning how to write kanji myself but it’s because I think it’s cool, I doubt it’s really worth it from a practical standpoint especially since I don’t intend to ever live long term in Japan.
Speaking of which, do Japanese language schools still do everything with pen and paper in classes? One of the few scenarios where I could see myself putting more effort into handwriting is if I were planning to go back and do more long term study in Japan like that.