Starting writing in Japanese

WaniKani
8

Here’s a couple of things we did back in school:

  • writing kanji onto each others back / hand: it was meant to be kind of a guessing game. One would write a kanji onto another person’s back. So they could not see the kanji but had to recognize it only from stroke order and stroke origin and stuff.
    => A version for self study would be writing the kanji into your own non-writing hand. You will know the kanji you’re about to write so there is no “guessing part”. The idea is, to focus on the feeling inside of the hand that is written on and picture the kanji from there.
    => A more “modern version” would be using an app / website like kanshudo or kokugo. The difference is though, you can’t feel anything onto your non-writing hand.
    => And to avoid misunderstandings, back then we kind of played this as games. We did not see this as some “officially approved to be helpful” study method :slight_smile:

  • pen or pencil?: back then we used a brush type pen. So the top of the pen was way more soft and flexible than either pencil or (ballpoint) pen. Nowadays, when you probably just type most of the time, I would argue they are way too expensive for what they are worth for. A good trade off might be using a marker.

  • write sentences / essays: we did write single kanji during handwriting lectures but mainly because that was the way we learned kanji back then. Nowadays, with all the different digital tools and SRS and stuff, I personally don’t see much use in it (and don’t do it parallel to WK). The major parts of writing we did were during grammar lectures or via writing (small) essays.
    => that’s something you can start doing right now. Start with simple sentences like This is two mountains. Between the mountains is a river. Above the mountains is heaven. ...
    => This may sounds “boring” at the beginning but gives you some good topics you can come back to once you’ve learned more grammar points and vocabulary. You then can re-write the sentences / essays into more sophisticated ones.

  • type of paper: back in school we had special type of paper for either “kanji study group” or essays.
    => What I use nowadays is an ordinary math notebook. I usually use 2x2 square when writing essays and 1x2 rectangle for spaces between groups of characters and 1x1 square between lines with characters. It feels slightly too large but gives me zero overhead in drawing any squares or lines myself.

So for people who made their decision and wish to practice handwriting I would probably recommend writing full sentences and essays. You can also use the Japanese Sentence a Day Challenge to get some feedback. Or you can write on topics from the Japanese only section and after writing it by hand you can type it into the corresponding thread and get some feedback. Or you can first translate some of the texts from your textbook and (a couple of weeks later) try to re-write something close to the Japanese original based on your translations.

@Joeni @xyrill: I do like your notebooks though. Both of them look pretty cool. And you can benefit from your habits writing down new kanji / vocab when encountering them “in the wild”, e. g. native material or while being in Japan or …
…oh and maybe toshi ue should be like this: 年上 :blush:

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