Learn to also WRITE kanji! 小学生手書き漢字ドリル

@hdloader11 & @optosi
It depends on what you need :slight_smile:
If your only goal is to stay in your country and read japanese or watch some japanese movies or anime then there really is not much reason to learn to write.
But if you are like me and would like to actually go to japan one day, either as a tourist or something more than that - then I think, learning to write japanese would be a major plus! :slight_smile:

I have this app! I have two of them… It’s yet another thing gathering virtual dust, but it does seem good. I keep meaning to resurrect my RTK book so I can learn the stroke orders before practicing with the app since, as far as I remember, the app tests but doesn’t teach. I just keep forgetting…

You don’t really need to know how to write kanji. Neither to work there, nor as a tourist. Most things are done by mail, line, etc… The good thing about writing is, that it enforces your kanji knowledge. As for writing down things it might come down to a form where you have to write down your name (which is in katakana anyway, just like most Japanese write it down for lists) or an address. 

DraGhoula said...  I always hear how important stroke order is, but is it really?
 
I'm really not an expert, so it's just my opinion. But I think it's something useful to know in the case where you have to read some handwritten kanji (or printed in a handwritten style...), since it's most of the time not the regular style you're used to see. Knowing the stroke scheme enables you to mentally visualize how the observed kanji has been drawn, and thus to identify it better.
To put it simple: it's like reading a handwritten katakana and choosing between the ン and the  ソ : you have to imagine how it was drawn.

With the same idea, if an Asian reads a kanji that you drew, he/she may rely a lot on the stroke properties if you're writing is not clear/perfect. For instance, I like to speak about kanji with a Chinese colleague of mine, and we often draw them in the air, with the finger as virtual brush. I can ensure you that, with the wrong stroke order/directions/..., he won't understand half of the time (plus the fact that he's used to the (semi-)cursive writing).


So I perfectly agree that it's not necessary at all, but it might be useful at some point. Besides, it's not mandatory to know the stroke scheme of each and every kanji, here we speak about a dozen of quite easy rules that work 90% of the time (ok, just my humble experience so far, I'm a newcomer in the world of Japanese language ;) ). Not so much work compared to learning 2000 kanji, I guess.

This one looked cool at first, but it was accepting grossly incorrect stroke orders as correct answers. For example, I drew 山 by first making a single tree sided stroke for the sides and bottom, going down, left, up, and then drew the middle stroke from bottom to top. For 空, I drew it completely in reverse with some reverse stroke directions as well. In both cases the app gave me encouraging ‘maru’. I definitely won’t be using this.

You need to open the config and set it to “strict” mode.

Really, you should just read the Tofugu article about stroke order, then write down Kanji every day. It’s fun!

I tried the strict setting (The star is setting? Not very intuitive!), but it was still willing to accept 十 drawn with the vertical first. Pretty disappointing.

My writing of anything except the simplest kanji/kana is very very ugly if I don’t follow stroke order. Maybe if I wrote something the wrong way for ages, over and over, it would start to look neat and no one would be able to tell I wrote it wrong, but I think you can usually tell with me. So if I’m going to handwrite, I will learn correct stroke order.

Cheri San, 
i have issues with apps dropping all the time on my iPhone. It’s usually because I’m low on space. I’m hoping you have had a chance to fix the problem and use the app by now, but if not, don’t give up hope. It might be worth managing the space on your phone and trying again. I have an app that sendmy photos to my computer directly, so I don’t have to waste extra space. Photos and videos are the fastest way to make space. Just a thought.

EskimoJo said... My writing of anything except the simplest kanji/kana is very very ugly if I don't follow stroke order. Maybe if I wrote something the wrong way for ages, over and over, it would start to look neat and no one would be able to tell I wrote it wrong, but I think you can usually tell with me. So if I'm going to handwrite, I will learn correct stroke order.
 I learned to write all my letters from the lower left corner, and did that for many years. I got good at it, but they still always looked ugly, my writing was slow, and people had trouble reading it if I wasn't careful. A few years ago I committed myself to completely re-learning writing. It wasn't too bad with only 62 characters to learn (upper case/lower case/numerals), and my writing is already substantially improved. I would never want to have to re-learn thousands of Kanji though. Better just to get them right in the first place as you say.

I feel like transcribing a word from hiragana (+context) to kanji helps your memory and understanding of the language
much than just copying it from your computer/a book or translating from your preferred language to japanese kanji.

Really love this app, great for testing yourself as well as reinforcing previous knowledge of kanji

Great structure and functionality 

10/10