I have a translation job in Japan that requires N1, and I haven’t had to handwrite kanji once. My translation partner is just as bad at handwriting as me.
In my last translation job (also Japan), occasionally I’d have to write down a note for someone when I picked up the phone and they were out of the office. But that would be like once a week, and that was honestly the only time apart from filling out forms that I ever needed to handwrite. That job required N2.
So it depends on the work environment a bit. My current job is 80% remote, so that factors in.
I’ve interviewed for a lot of similar jobs, and never once have I been asked about my handwriting.
The most common use for handwriting in my experience is when you have to fill out forms for the Japanese government, but even those can often be in English, and you can always look up your address if you haven’t got the kanji memorized. That’s a little embarrassing, but for me hundreds of hours practicing writing seemed more painful than 30 seconds of embarrassment a few times each year.
I am trying to get through all of WaniKani, so I also made an passive decision not to bother to learn (i) to the level of easy recall from nothing for speech (production) or (ii) writing from my WaniKani last of every day, as you have.
I think that is a good decision that will get you far. Particularly for reading ability, which then increases the chance to know it for speech production and for writing. It seriously feels like those are totally separate sections of my brain that prefer their own separate training (=time investment , including to subconscious learning of it through immersion)
I’ve been learning Japanese 3 years and 3 months (doing DuoLingo and WaniKani everyday with some kind of immersion)
When I write kanji, my relationship with it and its elements changes, and becomes more intimate. It’s easier then, to recognize this “known old friend” in other things, including the super-difficult handwriting fonts! Knowledge of stroke order and how it will blur in a writing rush is helpful for this decoding. When you yourself are writing it in a rush, you can more easily see the evolution (devolution?)
My experiences
When I started studying Japanese, I made small, handwriting flash cards. After about 300 (and seeing that fluency in Japanese requires knowledge of about 10,000 words) I quit doing that.
After the first year of studying Japanese, I started trying to read a paper book. I ended up copying each sentence out on paper (line iii), with one line of space below for (iv) readings/pronunciation, and two lines of space above for (ii) word-by-word meaning and then (i) naturalized English. Soon I was able to copy 2 pages of a bunko light novel onto 1 page of A4/8½x11 in under 30 minutes (while watching TV with my family).
I essentially wrote the entire book twice, because I was doing the transitions by putting it into Google Translate on “handwriting input” mode. How else was I going to get that unknown kanji into a digital device from paper ( I didn’t have photo translation/OCR set up)?
This slightly insane and time-consuming process unlocked a bunch of areas of my brain and made several subtle but noticeable improvements in my Japanese. I would follow along, reading these pages as the audiobook played. It increased my listening and scanning/reading speed and familiarity with that vocabulary.
But I had to close my eyes to really listen to that audiobook. If not, I find myself jumping my eyes from sentence to sentence (usually with my eyes tracking ました and things before commas and periods) because the native speech was generally too fast for me to absorb what was before my eyes. Trying to track the visual impaired my ability to focus on what they were actually saying.
My listening-only word-by-word comprehension of short sections those portions of the audiobook were significantly improved. But I couldn’t sustain the thoughtful comprehensive listening for long, not even when I had intensively translated the entire 40-minute (in audiobook) chapter…I was only “with it” for, like the first 2-3 minutes and then I was back to catching snatches.
I only handwrote the first bunko (Kikis Delivery Service) (that was 2 years ago, it took 4 months). Then I switched to doing the same thing on Power Point slides from digital copy/paste on my next book. I used different colors and font sizes for the different lines, so it was easier to follow along with the audiobook. It’s nice to be able to instantly check a meaning I was uncertain about. I continued with my listening-while reading-along plan, and also added in extensive listening to unanalyzed portions (the rest of the book).
After a while, interesting sections of the book would jump out at me, and I was able to find them in the text for sections of the book that I hadn’t read! The second book was Harry Potter, so I could tell what was happening: Diagon Alley! The Sorting Hat! Characters names! Recognizing names in katakana greatly improved my katakana reading/speaking ability. In the past 2 years, I have only intensively studied about 6 of the 17 Harry Potter chapters like that, because I’ve been plunging into all other media.
Underlying this all was constantly increasing vocabulary (using SRS)… So now, after 3 years of studying Japanese (2 since the book-writing)
that whole audiobook-translating and following-along process translated to subtitles in Japanese movies and anime.
But even with familiarly, and even having written it before… with a blank piece of paper in front of me and the command “now write the Kanji for X(which I know already really well)”, it’s very, very difficult!
Several days ago, in a challenge game, my study friends requested us to show pages of handwriting columns of practice kanji, an example of Japanese calligraphy (書道=しょどう), handwriting a short story in vertical writing, and handwriting 10 flashcards. I haven’t actually written in over a year, so I was annoyed.
But it’s made me think about whether I want to hand write Japanese. I like art, so I love it. But I still just.can’t. make the time in my daily study routine for writing. I’ll add it into my next round of increasing familiarity with every single word I’ve learned so far of Japanese. Like after I finish Duolingo and Wanikani.
If you have a ton of time it might be worth doing, but I’d not do it even if I had the time, rather spend that time on actual immersion. You’ll forget the vast majority of the writing anyway unless you do a lot of writing, most japanese probably dont unless they are actually in school. You, like vast majority of people would probably be better off ignoring writing and get into writing later. Writing will help you retain the kanji though, so there is that, but doubt it’s worth it.
I decided pretty early on not to bother to learn to write. I am have been doing Japanese through a night school class for several years and my teacher isn’t very happy about that. Her view is that learning Japanese means being respectful of the culture- and that means learning kanji the long way round - by writing them
Knowing the basic stroke order makes it so much easier to look up unknown kanji by drawing them in dictionary apps.
Just practicing writing a few kanji will let you get a feel for the correct stroke order, you don’t really need to learn to write every kanji there is. Although, as others mentioned, writing them down helps you remember their components better.
All in all, it’s totally up to you. And you can always change your mind later, one way or another.
I think it makes sense to learn how to write maybe a hundred of the most common ones, but that doesn’t need to be right away. I usually just see which words I end up writing the most often and memorize the kanji for those, since the more often you’re using them, the less likely you are to forget. If you’re trying to write all the kanji you know and making mistakes with radicals, that’ll be more difficult to read than just the hiragana, unless you feel like putting furigana. But in the end you really won’t need to physically write all that often unless you’re in a class.
Going back and learning is definitely one strategy. But one thing is that a lot of the popular Kanji books like Look and Learn are geared toward beginner/lower intermediate levels in terms of sentence content, so on one hand it might be nice review of the basics, but it could also feel way too boring/under-stimulating if you wait to get a super high level.
Also, this might just be my own personal weakness, but if I learned how to read basic kanji first without ever learning how to write them, then I know my “studying” later when I got to writing would be a lot of “psshh, I know that one, I can write it” and then skipping over tons of “easy” kanji that I wont be able to remember later…
Stroke order is not as hard as most people think. If you learn just the basic principles you will know what the stroke order of most kanji are. And you only really need to study the radicals beyond that to get a really good sense of stroke order.
Memorizing the kanji radical composition to handwrite from memory takes more effort obviously, but I would rather develop my ability to read Japanese out loud.
About writing Kanji in dictionary apps, I would say that handwriting keyboards (e.g. Google Keyboard on Android) are usually more accommodating than the apps themselves.
I used to think learning to write kanji (think recall, just looking at a kanji and writing it is simple enough) was useless, but now that I’ve done it for quite awhile after becoming an OK reader I’ve really changed my mind about it. I think it’s really helped solidify some of the similar kanji when I can remember the radical differences. It’s also developed my ability to ‘image the kanji in my head’. Overall it feels nice to really ‘own’ the kanji when you can write it and gives a nice concrete confidence boost of your abilities. Also, I’ve really enjoyed doing it and Kanken exercises lately . Though there are times when I dread doing them after a long day…
In the beginning I would not focus on it too much, but later when you have immersed a ton, just using some of those hours for writing practice will be more beneficial than adding 0.5% of immersion time. Brain likes novelty and it’s good to attack the language from all angles.
Learning stroke order is a no-brainer. Just learning to write a few hundred kanji, you will get a good feel of it and be correct like 95% of the time, sans a few tricky ones. It’s not a huge deal to make a mistake; it’s most likely still recognizable.
Yeah, when I started out, I learned how to write all of the kanji for the first 12 or so levels (using some printable worksheets that a WK user put together), and it ended up pretty much cementing most of the basics in my head.
I think it was valuable time to spend, honestly, even as a beginner, and even at the cost of sacrificing other study time, because it gave me the amazing superpower of being able to quickly sketch an unknown kanji on the IME pad and get it to give me what I was looking for about 99% of the time.
When you only know like 500 kanji, you’ll be running into unknown kanji all the time, and having to stop and look things up can be quite the bottleneck if you’re trying to read manga or something that doesn’t have digital text that you can copy and paste. You can look up kanji by other means, but drawing them is by far the quickest method. I think the time I put into practicing writing has easily paid off by making a lot of native material more available to me when I’d otherwise be stuck requiring stuff to have furigana.
At the later levels, look-ups aren’t as frequent and won’t slow you down as much, but as a beginner, you’ll be gated out of a lot of content just because the amount of unknown kanji is too much of a headache, unless you’re able to look them up fairly painlessly. Of course, this is less of a problem if you’re not trying to look up words in a manga, a print book, someone’s instagram story, or onscreen text during a Japanese pro wrestling show .
And I totally agree about switching up things with your studies from time to time and approaching the language from different angles. Right now, I’m trying to study pronunciation despite not intending to put the work into practicing speaking at the moment. I figured it would help me hear the language better and probably improve my listening comprehension, and sure enough…
There’s definitely a balance between efficiency and well-rounded study, and I think everyone has to figure out how to navigate that one themselves, but I think being more well-rounded (even if it’s just covering the literal basics in a lot of areas and not going past that) can actually have a lot of surprising benefits. You might find that an aspect of the language that you completely neglected or dismissed actually ends up improving your language ability in other areas when you do get around to trying it.
Really? I often find myself writing. Leaving aside common things like your own address, if I go to a clinic, or city hall, etc. I end up having to look up some kanji sometimes.
Personally, I often wrote kanji on the chalkboard if I need to explain things to students like what folder to get a file from, because precision in file names and getting them all to the file quickly was more important than trying to tell them how to do it in English. The English activity comes when they reach their destination.
You could look up all the kanji first, but the fact that I could quickly write them without checking made it a smooth process.
Seems to me that its similar to the “need” to handwrite English. How often do I handwrite something these days? I honestly can’t remember…and I write everyday, all the time. Welcome to the modern world. BTW I’m a boomer.
Do what works for you, because everyone has ways that help them to learn things better. If it helps you remember then learn to write them. If it doesn’t and you learn better through a different way, then learn that way.
For me, I learn better to recognise the differences between similar kanji by using them through writing as well as reading so I use a mix of both options in order to learn them. It works for me but you might find a different way that works better for you so find that way and follow it.
I’m essentially only using wanikani for learning the kunyomi and onyomi readings through the vocabulary as well as the gist of the kanji meanings as a refresher alongside my regular study methods.
I’ve kicked around the idea of practicing writing kanji just to help memorize them for the sake of recognition in writing, but it’s not a high priority for me. As of right now I don’t plan on ever needing to be able to hand write kanji on the spot in a real world situation. I’m not going to Japan anytime soon.
The thing that this always discounts – especially in the case of Japanese people, who have an alternative to kanji that is fully acceptable i.e. kana – is that almost all native speakers of languages that use kanji have to learn to write kanji while they’re growing up, often for years at a time, and that probably has huge impacts on their kanji knowledge and how they use kanji for the rest of their lives, even if they don’t actually need to write them very often later on.
Also, just a random fact from my recent experience: I’m a Chinese speaker, and I’m doing an internship at a company that most likely contacted and accepted me for my Chinese fluency, among other things. When I take notes during meetings with our contacts from China, typing goes out the window. Even if I wanted to type, needing to pick the right homophone from all the other characters that sound the same, hoping the computer will guess what sentence structure I’m using so it’ll give me the right words and so on… what a nightmare. (And I’m not a slow typist, by the way: my maximum words per minute in English is over 130WPM if I’m only dealing with common words.) I’m just glad I learnt to write fast in kanji about 6 years ago. There are instances where being able to write by hand is not only necessary, but will also trump anything you can do with an IME unless you’re very used to that IME.
How’s this related to your question? Well, first off, sometimes writing by hand is necessary. That depends on what you’ll use your Japanese for. Secondly, what I’ve just said about Chinese reveals something about me that also applies to Japanese learning: having experience writing things by hand means I’ve learnt to pull kanji combinations out from my memory in order to express myself, and that means I have to be more aware of what different kanji mean and how they go together. Granted, I’ve been speaking Chinese in varying amounts all my life, but that doesn’t mean the same effects don’t appear in small amounts for a Japanese or Chinese learner who writes by hand.
The other major benefits of writing by hand:
And honestly just remembering kanji and kanji components better. I am not kidding when I say I learnt the reading and general shape (two parts above, one below in the centre) of 鑿 alongside many other kanji over the course of four hours by doing Kotoba quizzes (i.e. visual thingummies that tested me on the readings for kanji compounds it showed me), and then learnt to write it after exactly one more review months later. (I just hadn’t worked out how to write the top left component.) Do I remember what it means? No, admittedly not, but at least the entire kanji is in my head and I can identify it. I’m only able to do this because most components are so familiar and I can just write them mentally.
Also, this
is something I have to agree with. You can remember huge, complex kanji just because you know how they have to flow in order to be written. That gives you an automatic way of breaking down kanji into parts, as opposed to doing stuff like wondering why the crab has to be next to the elephant trunk that’s sitting on the slide when you remembered that the crab had an elephant trunk. (I’m making things up, but my point is that unfortunately, a lot of mnemonics don’t account for spatial arrangements.)
Exactly. You also get faster at writing and learning to write… as you write! Also, the thing is, you don’t even have to write kanji for the sake of learning to write fluidly by hand. You can just do it once in a while to help you remember new kanji. There’s a mid-to-long-term payoff in terms of kanji learning speed, and even if you aren’t interested in that, there’s the short-term benefits of having to concentrate on a kanji and realise where all the strokes are.
What I said, though I have to say I’m slightly surprised: how did your native friends (or just acquaintances? I don’t want to be presumptuous) know it would bottleneck? Or rather, perhaps I just don’t really see what you meant about collocations… are you talking about the fact that you might simply recognise the overall look and meaning of a kanji compound, but not be able to identify an old kanji in a new compound?
To sum up, no, it’s not at all necessary to learn to write kanji if you just want to read and type, and it probably has little bearing on your ability to speak and understand speech. However, I think it has benefits in terms of new kanji learning speed, avoiding confusing similar kanji, and just kanji memory in general. It might also help you recall words better because it just gives you another memory: ‘Hey, wasn’t that the thing I had to write three times before it looked right?’ Not needed, definitely, but you might want to consider the benefits before throwing it aside entirely. I sincerely think writing at least a little (like 5 times per kanji every few reviews – you can space writing practice sessions a month apart if you want) will only help you, not harm you. I think it’s a misconception to assume that any attempt to write kanji must be oriented towards fluid writing as an end goal. You can do writing practice without ever meaning to achieve that. In my experience, what matters most in learning is making an effort to learn, and everything that engages you in a learning task helps you with that. I don’t always memorise something the first time, but wanting to remember it and making my best effort definitely makes me learn it faster.
. Though there are times when I dread doing them after a long day…