Statement that nobody claimed (or I missed it)
Just anecdotally, even as an ALT (the most “It’s okay; you don’t have to use any Japanese” job in Japan), I still encounter situations regularly where I want to write, and not just repetitive info for paperwork: writing notes to other teachers, writing explanatory comments on student essays where they really need a bit of Japanese to help clarify a correction, occasionally writing on the board, etc. It happens. Sometimes I can do it without looking something up; many other times I just wind up wishing I could.
Those kinds of situations would only multiply if you’re here long-term, especially as fluency increases. Resumes, etc. all require some level of hand-written, non-boilerplate input. Little situations where you’ll want to write crop up all the time. ctmf touched on this above, but what dedicated writing practice I have done also drastically helped with my ability to read others’ chicken-scratch versions, which I encounter every day.
It’s not so essential that it can’t be your least prioritized area of study, or even put aside entirely if you aren’t going to be in the country long-term professionally, but if it gets to the point where your daily life is conducted in and around Japanese, I’m incredulous of the idea that writing’s really something you can just say you don’t need. I already feel the detriments of not being able to do it.
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Several people have suggested it’s actually necessary for living in Japan.
And maybe it’s worth just noting again… I love writing to the point that I practice it to the detriment of other skills I should be studying more (namely grammar)
In other words, I’m on the “I hardly ever have to write, but I do it all the time because I love to, so I think that’s the reason someone should write, not because they’re worried about bank forms some day” side of this, I guess
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Not really. Imagine if you handed a pen and paper to someone who didn’t know the Latin alphabet and they pulled out reference material in order to write their name down. More than how you may or may not feel about them, how they would feel about themselves is likely to have an impact on their confidence in interacting with you going forward.
I feel like people think of the majority of situations and think “oh I always type on English, so I don’t technically need to learn how to write in Japanese”. This is nuts. The minority of situations where you will be faced with a sheet and will need to write would probably be enough to make you feel like an idiot when you’re being expectantly stared down by everyone waiting in line behind you.
Confidence matters too and having to be meek because one omitted a life skill when they didn’t have to seems unnecessary to me. I feel like one might as well commit properly and once and for all if one is going to learn a language, rather than do it halfway. It really doesn’t take that much more effort to learn to write kanji when you’re learning to read them anyway.
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Do you have one in mind ? I can’t find any saying that’s a necessary skill, even for living in Japan.
And I agree with your last statement. If it’s not fun it’s not worth.
Okay, if someone has a kanji name and they can’t write it, I agree, that would be pretty awkward.
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The last back-and-forth I had before this? The post from TheSyllogism. Or maybe you’re asking me to say that if you ctrl-f for “necessary” it won’t be in the post. I’m talking about the message of it.
I live in Japan as an ALT currently (yes for the business trips and point cards and anything to do with where you live), but I’ve always been interested in how Kanji characters are written, so maybe I am a little bit more involved with the importance of learning such things. But I think stroke order is really important in searching for unknown Kanji in a dictionary for example. Sometimes you may think you understand a character, but searching through a dictionary for it leaves you puzzled until you think of a different way it could be written and BOOM, you’ve magically discovered something new in Japanese.
When there is an unknown Kanji and I am on the internet, I use this website: https://kanji.sljfaq.org/ so I can practice hand-drawing the strokes in the order I think they are in. It is fun to see the Kanji that arise from your own brain working to decipher the characters and it feels great to see it come up on your first try.
Even just making your own flash cards by hand can have you practice writing the Kanji once, not saying you have to do it a thousand times.
Also, you could brag about your favorite Kanji to write by hand, or better yet, your least favorite. <3
And also, sometimes I can’t read anything that other Japanese people write to me, so I try to copy it after them and sometimes it doesn’t turn out the same, so they can just correct me clearly.
I’ve been living in Japan, working in a Japanese company and am married to a Japanese. I got my driver’s license here, again in Japanese, and not ONCE did i HAVE TO write more than my name/address.
And my name is indeed 大向アンディ
Not even the Japanese language itself is needed here, much less so handwriting. Japanese itself has a lot of benefits and is a huge quality of life boost, but writing…
Writing is nice. It helps when learning, it’s (sometimes) fun and it can be handy.
But no. Whoever says it’s needed in Japan has no clue.
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I would mark this again in “yes, there are benefits” column, but you can just point your phone at kanji characters to look them up now too.
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That was just an example though. I’ve been asked to provide restaurant recommendations, book recommendations, grammar explanations, math explanations, and all on a sheet of paper. Granted this was in French, but that seems irrelevant here when compared to the ability to write the Latin alphabet.
Surely kana is acceptable most of the time for that kind of thing if people actually are relying on you for the info. Today in class the kids had an assignment where they had to unscramble a Japanese fairy tale in English, and one of the things they had to do was write the Japanese name of it. About half of them didn’t know the kanji for it, but anyone who had the title in kana right still got credit.
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No I am not.
But saying that if you live in Japan, you WILL have to write some stuff (which is true), doesn’t imply (at least for me) that knowing how to write is mandatory, just that it will be of come in handy. There is always workaround, like he mentioned (and you).
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Learning the strokes does help you remember kanji better, but it’s also probably more effort than it’s worth. I resisted giving up learning strokes for a long time, but I definitely started making progress a lot faster once I finally did.
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Then again, nobody said that.
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As another Japanese driver’s-license holder who gets through daily life without really needing writing for survival, can we all just agree that while it’s too far to say you’ll never survive without it, there are still some pretty impactful quality-of-life benefits? Like, even just the basic mental security of knowing you can put together a hand-written note without it being a production? Or, as another example, I was recently in a training meeting with native Japanese teachers where we had to put together a big goal-setting poster board, and while I could participate in brainstorming and discussion, you bet I also wish I could have written more than a few kanji without guidance.
I guess its necessity in-country is just going to boil down to what your criteria for “need” is and how independent you want to feel. I feel that my having to look up most kanji for writing, even the ones I can read, is a distinct negative. Others probably wouldn’t care. You can survive either way, so I guess just think about where you fall on the scale if you’re even in the niche circumstance of being in the country long-term in the first place.
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Nobody has claimed that, but I was unaware that living in Japan for any duration was enough of a qualification to make blanket statements like that. The fact that you have not needed to write is anecdotal, a singular data point. But it only takes one person who has needed it for anything critical to undermine your conclusion.
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Completely agree with you there. At that point it would probably just come down to how much one cares about how they might be perceived.
Oh yeah, I’m a fan of handwriting, and I totally argued for it, but then this thread went all out of hand, and suddenly penmanship went from a useful and fun skill to have, well worth learning, to something you need, and suddenly, you have to write in Japanese.
Let’s just get this straight here for all the confused newbies who might stumble into this thread and walk out backwards shivering in terror:
Japanese handwriting is not needed AT ALL, EVER, in Japan.
You can draw your name and address while looking at your alien card, and you can even write in English in many cases - I do so when I don’t have the time/energy to deal with slowly constructing kanji with a pen on paper.
Is it great? YES, it’s great.
Is it useful? ABSOLUTELY! You can write notes for your wife, your colleagues, or just try to look cool.
Is it FUN? For me, yes. I like kanji. I made the conscious decision once to befriend them, and now they’re my best buddies.
Just let’s get our feet on the ground. Some of my acquaintances can mumble a thickly accented “ouheyou gouzeymasss” and nothing else, and they live just fine.
But they also miss out on a lot.
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I don’t see anyone who has actually said that. What has been said is that it is beneficial and it is possible for people who have had different experiences from yours to actually land up in situations where they do need it. No one is claiming you have or haven’t needed it, but making claims that it is useless based on your exposure seems unreasonable to me.
So yes, to make it clear to newbies:mostly, you probably won’t need it. But YMMV. I would say that it’s better to have and not need than need and not have.