I really want to use writing / color coding notes to help me learn sentence production. The thing is, I really don’t care to learn how to write Kanji. I don’t want to spend the time on it, I don’t care to ever have the skill. I’m completely happy learning to read, speak, and listen, while only using digital means for writing.
My question is; would writing in Romaji be bad? Should I suck it up and at least learn to write Kana?
If the consensus is that I should write in Kanji, well… I might just not write at all.
Edit: I guess as another option, I could just practice sentence production via typing, but writing just feels so… portable. It also seems to be more effective for retaining things.
If you really see a benefit to handwriting (but don’t want to learn kanji), I’d definitely recommend writing in kana. There obviously aren’t nearly as many kana characters as kanji, so it’s not too bad.
You’re going to know how to write some kanji by the time you get to a certain point in your studies, whether you practice it or not. There are elements that are just too ubiquitous and simple to not at least pick up some.
I guess I’m trying to say… “Too bad, because you’re going to naturally learn how to write some kanji no matter what!”
Well, to be fair there can be a massive difference between recognition and production in the case of writing kanji. I doubt I can write more than 25 kanji.
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(But yeah, you should definitely learn how to write hiragana at least. I like using kanji for note-taking/organizational purposes because it takes up less space, is easier for me to see what the word is and how it fits grammatically, and I don’t find writing it difficult in any way, but that’s just personal preference. )
Well, I suppose you could communicate by only writing kana, but, well, it will look like this:
Which Japanese people have admitted to me is a bit painful to read. I understand how daunting writing kanji seems, but not only is it quite necessary to produce mature-looking and communicative Japanese, as you learn the most basic kanji (think the first few levels of WK), you’ll learn radicals, and kanji is made up of smaller kanji. You’ll learn how to write new characters like figuring out a puzzle. I don’t practice writing outside of my Japanese classes because I don’t deem it as necessary to reinforce as speaking and listening, but it was not as troubling as I thought it would be once I understood how radicals function. Excuse me if this has already been told to you ad nauseum.
I would be in the typing camp, which if you use a phone should be just as portable as writing. I’ve not looked into the research surrounding writing vs typing when it comes to recall myself, but I feel like this falls outside the typical debate. Your goal is practicing sentence formation, not recalling the content of what you write.
I personally think most of the benefit of taking notes by hand stems from it being slower. It forces you to spend more time thinking about what you’re writing, or summarize the content in your own words to allow you to spend less time on it. I think this might actually work against you if your goal is to write as much as possible.
This question was purely note-taking-related. As far as communicating goes, I don’t intend on ever using a pen & paper. If I’m going to communicate via writing, it will be digitally.
Its good to know learning how to write isn’t as bad as it seems, though, so thanks for that tip!
I think a lot of people probably never learn how to write kanji and just use digital means of communication.
For your purposes, I would at least learn hiragana if only for the sake of teaching your brain to associate sounds with the kana characters rather than English letters.
I vote to definitely write kana. They say that once you are comfortable producing the kana by hand, it becomes easier to recognize different fonts and handwriting - simply because you recognize the strokes rather than the produced shape.
To help me go through this, I made a simple tool online to display strokes order for any letter in a sentence. At least even if don’t know a kanji I can write it down and study it later (or not ^^)
