Fair enough, and like I said, it’s not necessary if you only want to read. Your experience is proof enough, (and in all honesty, some of the kanji you posted are things I can’t read and have never seen, so yes, it clearly works). I also didn’t say anyone should spend hours on writing (unless calligraphy interests them).
Yes, I was referring to this.
I know this. As a kanji lover, I had to change the habits I had formed with Chinese, and so I did. But using kana only isn’t something native speakers do often either. I’m not saying, however, that it’s impossible to learn to ‘output’ kanji by just learning to read and using an IME: one can always use one’s reading skills to check that the right kanji are available. I just think that it will feel less natural for someone who isn’t used to ‘outputting’ kanji.
Anyway, call it native Chinese speaker pride or a product of the social pressures I’m used to, but I tend to think it’s a shame when people don’t learn to write kanji. To me, it would be like losing an arm, and I honestly don’t think it’s as time-consuming as you think unless a certain level of aesthetic beauty is desired, particularly because of the abundance of repeated patterns. I want to be able to communicate fluently in Japanese both when speaking and in writing, and I believe that kanji knowledge is a big part of that, even if it’s not essential with IMEs. Still though, why I said what I did about finding the right kanji is this: a lot of common Chinese errors occur precisely because people substitute characters with the same readings for one another. We have pinyin just like Japanese has kana, but IMEs can’t always protect us from mistakes. Also, as someone of Chinese descent (my grandparents migrated south from China), I would be judged very severely by my peers if I weren’t able to write at least the most common characters, so for me, kanji knowledge is very important. (My grandparents were illiterate, by the way, and my Chinese is better than my mother’s, so there’s no parental pressure at play. It’s just that my grandfather taught himself to read and write, and his calligraphy was beautiful.)
At the end of the day, I reiterate my stand on this: if you only want to be able to read, listen to and speak Japanese, by all means, skip writing practice. If you hate the idea of trying to memorise the order of strokes, give it a miss: it probably won’t hurt you. I know there are characters in Simplified Chinese that only differ by one or two strokes, but I haven’t seen many of those in Japanese, or at least I can’t think of any right now. I think knowing how to write is valuable, but it’s really a question of priorities and goals: my background is different from yours, so my perspective on the importance of writing kanji is surely different as well, and I want to be proficient enough to live, work and do research in Japan, and maybe even write essays, so I’m sure my goals are different too. Dropping kanji writing practice is a completely acceptable and justifiable personal decision, but I just don’t think learning to write should be written off as an inherent waste of time.
. Is this a superpower attained by reaching a certain level of Japanese proficiency?
I didn’t make the connection when I first read it.