I’m honestly quite confused because a lot of people say that spending time handwriting kanji is a waste, but there are also many studies that show handwriting things helps improve memory.
Whether you handwrite or not, is there a reason you do your method? Are you satisfied with it? Is there a particular method you use for it to be effective?
Any feedback is welcome, since I’m getting so many mixed messages. Thanks!
I handwrite. I do think it helps with memorization but it also adds a significant study load over just focusing on recognition. If I reallocated my writing time into just reading more, I suspect that overall the memorization advantage may completely vanish.
My advice is: if you want to learn to write, do it. If you don’t want to learn to write, don’t do it. I doubt you’ll regret your decision either way.
I agree that writing helps improve memory, other than that it is generally quite useless in our digital age which is why people say it’s a waste.
In formal education, it’s very common for homework assignments to include writing newly learned kanji anywhere from 10-100 times.
Personally, if there’s some kanji I’m struggling to remember because I’m mixing it up with some other similar kanji, I will write it a few times and really try to internalize what makes a kanji distinct.
It’s a good question. Like others have said, if you want to and plan on using it I think it’s a good idea. All I know is that I learned how to write but have forgotten most of it since I never use it. But I do think it helped my kanji reading skills in certain ways and it is nice to be able to describe kanji in conversations when stuff gets ambiguous and people start to write stuff in the air.
I do like writing short diary phrases or texts, so I learn to write Kanji. Something about being able to write Kanji makes me really proud and happy. And for me personally I don’t feel like I “mastered” a language without being able to write in it. It always feels incomplete. That it also helps with memorization and differentiating Kanji is a bonus. However I don’t learn to write every Kanji. As I’ll probably never work in Japan or an environment where that is necessary, I sticked to learning how to write the N5 and N4 Kanji. And a few other Kanji that appear quite frequently. Like 内 (inside) or 市 (town) are N2 Kanji.
I think that if you combine it with output (as in writing a short text) the workload decreases or well you increase the benefit, depending on the viewpoint.
When language YouTubers say this I think it’s more from the perspective of day-to-day usefulness, versus whether or not it will help you learn. Two separate things.
I’m sure spending the time does help your memory, but learning how to write is a huge time investment and I’m very skeptical that the gains beat out spending that time doing more SRS and, as soon as you can, reading more.
I never learned to handwrite Japanese because I have little interest and don’t expect to ever use it in my life. The decision really just comes down to if you have a reason you’d need to (plans to live in Japan) or if it’s something you want to be able to do. If you don’t feel drawn to handwriting, it’s actually pretty freeing to be able to pick things and just decide you don’t have to bother.
Looking back over the thread now that I already wrote this… pretty much 1:1 what @simias said.
About the “too much time” aspect, that is true only if you do extensive writing, hundreds of kanji in a row.
But you can also do small srs, writing each kanji only once, and about 5 minutes per day. That won’t exhaust you.
And it does help.
Just some days ago I have been shocked to realize that 飼, that I recognize since looong time, is actually 食司and not 食同. Until I wrote it I didn’t 'otice, in all those years.
Also, I’m happy to be able to write 薔薇、竃門炭治郎 or 鱗滝
Frankly, I think people are (a) speaking from ignorance (they haven’t actually done it, they haven’t actually seen how much it helps) and (b) trying to justify laziness* when they say not to write. Those were, at least, true of me before I tried it. And the *asterisk is there because doing recognition only is not actually the laziest way: writing from memory seems harder up front, but that’s just the first few times you get the prompt and try to do it. The direct effect of that initial extra work is stronger memory connections, and you literally end up doing less work in the long run (even in the short term of a couple months). So it’s really more of an unfounded anxiety than anything (“that seems like it would be a lot of work”: speaking of which, does that sound familiar from people who’ve heard you’re learning Japanese in the first place?).
I’m up to 2600 kanji now thanks to Ringotan, and from how things were going before I started using Ringotan, it would have taken me at least twice as long to get here without it. I saw 珊瑚 today, and I was able to know immediately that it wasn’t a word I had encountered before, whereas otherwise I would be thinking of 醍醐 or 嘲る or 柵 and it would all blend into a blur of “I’ve seen I-don’t-know-how-many-similar-kanji-to-these-I’ve-seen-so-I-have-no-clue-if-it’s-one-of-the-ones-I-already-know-or-not.”
I agree with what most people are saying, I just want to add that for me writing kanji by hand has been the most effective way to deal with leeches (i.e. kanji that just won’t stick using srs alone). But as a general approach srs + immersion is the way to go, and handwriting can be added if you want to. I like it and think I will use it since I keep handwritten journals in English/Norwegian from time to time (although currently I journal in Obsidian) and adding Japanese to the mix once the prospect doesn’t sound mentally exhausting would be neat.
writing is useful just for being able to more easily look shit up in dictionary apps imho at the least
I think those are studies more along the lines of writing out information increases out the chances that you retain it (as opposed to typing). Not about the actual process of practicing handwriting.
Either way though, writing out Kanji will inevitably help you remember them better. But it will also (almost) inevitability take away time you could be using to study the recognition of other Kanji. So as you can see, being a waste and improving memory are not actually mutually exclusive. If you don’t NEED or WANT to remember Kanji to the point where you can recall them from memory, then it makes sense to only focus on recognition. Training a skill you don’t care about is the waste. If you care about writing, then it’s not a waste. It’s that simple. Just don’t be under the impression that writing is some how going to speed up your reading ability improvement and you’re going to get some extra efficient win win hack.
This is conflating one claim that’s self-evident: a minute spent drawing one kanji is a minute not spent learning to recognize another - but a minute spent recognizing one kanji is a minute not spent learning to recognize another, too - with one that very much isn’t. One way or another, you have to develop the ability to recognize hundreds to maybe thousands of kanji. The question is whether practicing recognition or practicing output gets you consistently recognizing each one of those kanji faster. And we don’t have Japanese specific studies on this, but the studies on handwriting notes probably aren’t as relevant as the studies*** showing that practicing output with a language boosts recognition by a lot while practicing recognition has relatively little impact the other way. And anecdotally…
This is exactly what those of us who have done it say happened, from the other side. I was so stunned by how effective it was that I’m considering flipping all of my language practice into output. It is very evident to me that I spent less total time on kanji after the point at which I frontloaded output to build recognition. I was taking the WaniKani levels at about 1.5x max speed and now I wish I could jump several levels and speed the algorithm up because I feel like I already know the stuff I’m about to unlock in four levels so well.
*** Just a quick example citation since I lost all my old bookmarks: OUTPUT, INPUT ENHANCEMENT, AND THE NOTICING HYPOTHESIS | Studies in Second Language Acquisition
The major findings are: (a) Those engaged in output-input activities outperformed those exposed to the same input for the sole purpose of comprehension in learning gains
and let’s be clear about something, the ‘proper’ way to write a kanji that’s usually listed in dictionaries isn’t always how the common handwritten form will look like. any time I have to parse handwritten material my brain fizzles out.
Depends completely on your goals and situation.
I am living in Japan right now and want to work on my speaking and reading abilities as fast and much as possible for me. Even though I am living here I never really have to write except for my name and address.
Do I want to be able to write? of course! Is it useful to reach my goal? No, currently it isn’t.
I will probably work on my writing in the future when I have more time to spare but currently it would just slow my overall progress too much.
Well, no. Anecdotally, the people I know who have learned writing and gotten their reading to a very high level tend to say that it helped (and I’m sure it did) and not that they were able to improve more than they would have if they spent that time on dedicated reading practice. Maybe you feel that way, but not everyone does. Besides, the important part at the end of the day isnt recognizing Kanji. It’s recognizing words. Like you gave 醍醐, 珊瑚, and 嘲る as an example as how much writing helped, but all I can think of is you would have to go terribly wrong in your studies to ever mix any of those words up in the first place…
I personally stopped focusing so much on the Kanji after I completed wanikani and just learned all my words as their own thing. Worked very well and many other high level users I know did the same thing. If you tried to actually remember every Kanji, I can’t say I’m surprised you struggled. It’s not necessary in order to read though.
I only have time to skim it, but this seems to be essentially taking the position that when people output in a language they notice words and grammar structures that they struggle with, which helps reinforce what details they need to watch out for.
“Of the four functions of output specified in the current version of the Output Hypothesis (Swain, 1993, 1995, 1998), the present study focuses on its noticing function. The noticing function of output posits that learners may notice the gap in their IL knowledge in an attempt to produce the TL, which then prompts them to solve their linguistic deficiency in ways that are appropriate
in a given context.”
It’s really a stretch to then take that to mean output = better improvement when the “output” is just writing down a kanji. Me typing to my Japanese friends on Discord would apply to this finding, not handwriting individual kanji.
To add onto how Vanilla pointed out not everyone says that; the very first response in this thread is from someone who handwrites and doubts that it is doing this.
Handwriting is one of the few easy ways to flex since it’s speaking is now more common. My handwriting isn’t that good looking but writing something like 鰐蟹 or 憂鬱 usually gets some easy praise.
I also like it and it’s one of the reasons I started learning Japanese. I hate writing by hand in my native language and that is a lost cause but Japanese is still something new and cool to me.
It’s a bit of a non sequitur, but you’ve gotten me imagining a stonemason’s apprentice tasked with learning those kanji characters by repeatedly hand carving them into a granite slab with a hammer and chisel for practice…
So as I mentioned, that was a last-second Google tack-on at the end of my comment after I realized I couldn’t easily retrieve my old bookmarks. I had a large folder that came from reading textbooks from university presses on memory research and compiling anything I found relevant to my own process. What I was really looking for was the generation effect. The generation effect is:
a phenomenon whereby information is better remembered if it is generated from one’s own mind rather than simply read.
A meta-analysis showing just how robust this is:
The generation effect: a meta-analytic review:
The size of the generation effect across the 86 studies was .40–a benefit of almost half a standard deviation of generation over reading.
For a sloppy analogy: half an SD is like gaining about 15lbs or 100 points on the SAT.
Most studies use a particular kind of test to examine, but if you dig around you can find it being applied in one context after another. The reason I assumed any random study pulled would have some relevance is because I know there is study after study in context after context. And I do think it is relevant (even if it isn’t the most relevant kind of study I can point to) that people learn grammar faster when they output grammar compared to just reading grammatical sentences, because it supports the general phenomena, and shows yet another context where it applies; it seems to apply just about everywhere, the only caveats are when the desired output is impossibly hard (so maybe you shouldn’t have learners handwriting 頻繁 or 薔薇 on day 1), trivially easy (so maybe you don’t see as much difference when it comes to outputting versus recognizing 日), or outputting distracts from reading comprehension when they do this in tasks with narration. Besides, the people who are most adamantly against output are against it everywhere with the same arguments, so debunking it anywhere starts cracking that foundation.
not everyone says that
I’d be very willing to bet real money that most of the people who are handwriting are not doing it with an effective spaced repetition schedule because they’re thinking more about making the words on the paper look pretty and even than leveraging the generation effect to learn faster, and that it’s foregoing the massive benefits of SRS that slows them down. Sure, I don’t think outputting kanji is so powerful that it overrides how effective SRS is. But I’ve yet to see one person who did SRS with output that didn’t come out raving about it.
Anyway, I’m not here to try to argue, I’m here to try to help people, and I think this is something that can help people massively. We just need to be clear that you’ll approach this one way if your goal is “make people to do backflips when I write”, and another way to optimize learning.
