I’ve been mainly prioritizing kanji, vocab & grammar until now and took JLPT N3 earlier this month which went pretty smoothly and I expect to pass, fingers crossed
My issue is that I need to learn how to write at my level as I’m currently waiting on my COE to move to Japan in April 2026 to attend a language school (2 year course).
While handwriting will likely not be that essential during day to day life, it’ll be pretty much required for school and I was informed that its placement test prior to the term’s beginning won’t include writing, so I either intentionally score at a lower level and work from there or grind writing until April
For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been doing the worksheets I printed out via Kanji.sh but it’s becoming apparent that the time it takes me to do them every day is not sustainable as I work towards N3 Kanji. I can get about 20 pages (5 Kanji on each, repeated 20 times) done in about 3-4 hours before my hand starts hurting too much.
While I actually find it fun to write Kanji, another issue is that I find it really hard to just recall what a given kanji looks like to write it from memory, which will be essential for actually writing things… so I had the idea that starting a diary & forcing myself to write my own sentences could help practice that and seems like a few older threads on here also mention the same thing.
Have you tried writing a diary in Japanese to study writing? Did it work for you? Do you know of a different method that you found more efficient?
(My first post on here, apologies if I picked the wrong category, please redirect if so )
I’ve been practicing kanji handwriting for years now and I’ve started a diary thing a couple months ago. Every day I write a short paragraph. It definitely helps but it takes a very long time to become good at handwriting.
I expect that the physical cramping will quickly stop if you practice daily, for the rest it will take a lot of time and dedication.
Cramping itself isn’t a big issue and I definitely agree that it hurts less as I continue daily, I guess the main problem is the amount of time it takes each day, while those 3-4 hours are enough to completely finish writing all N5 Kanji 20 times on the worksheet, I need 2 days to finish all of N4 and 3-4 days to finish all of N3 which reduces to overall complete repetition I can do of these higher levels in the long term and I don’t know if that muscle memory will be as effective in being able to recall them from memory
I did initially try some SRS apps for writing but I’m not quite sure if the stylus writing will translate properly to pen & paper.
If we’re thinking within the School context, I suppose it may be okay if I take notes during classes digitally and either fully handwrite my homework or write them digitally first then put them on paper? Which feels like cheating but I’ll have to take the time it takes to write into account to make deadlines and such, and if that dexterity isn’t there for taking notes during classes, trying to do so would likely just take my attention away from the class itself
I might give it a shot since writing like this is just something I’ll have to do anyway regardless of whether I’ll be good at it and I won’t get good at it without doing it XD
I was also wondering, is there any tool to just randomly pick topics as thought starters to write down individual sentences about different topics? The diary may get repetitive if it’s just about my day to day life as that doesn’t change all that much (at least in my case lol)
Some topic variety may be more efficient in terms of distributing the practice across various contexts
I thought exactly the same when I started writing a diary. However, it turns out that every day life generates lots of things I want to say / write which are much harder to express than I expected.
My diary is boring, but it’s also full of Japanese that I had to learn in order to write it.
While I’m not the most experienced in writing Japanese, especially not in an academic sense, I have kept a diary on and off pretty much since I began studying the language (the only reason I’m not keeping it up very consistently right now is to focus on reading) and it has definitely helped quite a bit, and I feel like I made a good amount of progress with it, though when writing diary entries I do still like to look things up a fair amount in a dictionary if I’m not sure what word to use.
As I said, I’m not the most qualified person to give advice especially academic-wise, but writing kanji from memory does become somewhat easier the more you do it. I think it depends on the kanji though, and being able to recall kanji from memory is pretty difficult, to the extent where Japanese people can’t always remember how to write it - so I wouldn’t stress about that a lot. I’ve also heard that when taking notes, Japanese people often write a fair amount of words in ひらがな as opposed to trying to remember the kanji.
Yeah exactly, I find that it’s often hard to start but usually as I’m writing an entry I get an idea for a future article. I actually have a page in my notebook where I list ideas that I can draw upon when I can’t think of anything to talk about on a particular day. One of those is “pens” because I like pens and I could talk about that. Sometimes I talk about very mundane things like the weather or going to the gym, sometimes I talk about more abstract or philosophical ideas or what’s going on in the news or movies I’ve watched etc…
The point of course is to find excuses to produce the language and get more comfortable with the basic idioms and expressions that you use in day-to-day Japanese. I really find it useful and even though I’ve been doing it for less than two months I already feel a lot more comfortable than when I started.
It’s been a long time since I needed to write, so a slight pinch of salt on these suggestions, but:
Mnemonics are really useful for getting you over the “I cannot remember anything about this kanji” barrier; being systematic about them and making sure you have a story that takes you from the kanji to its components matters a lot more than if you’re only working on recognition
Practice of physical writing helps get things into muscle memory
For SRS I suggest drilling whole vocab word to kanji, not just English keyword to kanji
The last one is based more on negative experience than positive – I did all of Remembering the Kanji (RTK) and at one point could handwrite them all from the English keywords, but had trouble integrating that into writing Japanese, where the requirement is to go from べんきょう to 勉強…
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