Oh wow, this is still going! Have a few hours to kill here in Tokyo before my flight back this afternoon, figured I’d catch up. Beautiful day here btw.
So as I alluded to earlier, my first ~16 months of Japanese study were geared towards this week long solo trip, which has been fun and quite the adventure. Oddly enough, at no point did I have to write any kanji. Go figure. However I did at one point get to write トム on a waiting list at a gyoza joint in Kyoto. So, total two characters of katakana over ten days
The interesting question I now get to pose to myself is - what next, with my Japanese study? Bit more open ended since I don’t have a tangible return trip planned or anything. Might be a good opportunity to return to practicing some writing which I’d deferred until now, just to be more well-rounded.
As an aside, if there’s one thing I’d advocate for anyone planning a trip - it’s listening practice at native speed. As much as possible. As. Much. As. Possible.
Seems like pretty much everyone I’ve talked to has been more than happy to have a conversation in Japanese if that’s how you open it, but wow is it ever fast. Makes sense I suppose, to your everyday person here it’s not like they’re going to be “Ah, so you’re probably N4-ish with bits of N3 grammar and vocabulary, I’ll adjust my lexicon and rate of speech accordingly.” It’s pretty much all or nothing!
Yeah, I think the only time I ever wrote kanji in Japan is the time I visited Koke-dera in Kyoto, and was asked to write a wish as part of a service I needed to attend for entry. I elected to write 世界平和.
Aye, I’ve done that. Not トム specifically, but rather written my name on a restaurant waiting list.
I know several foreigners who work in Japan at real jobs (game companies) and have been told that you don’t necessarily even need to know how to read kanji, let alone be able to write it (since most communication is in e-mail and there are great plugins). So take that for what it’s worth!
My preferred option is Anki on mobile with the „scratch pad“ enabled. Free (just Anki is a one time fee if you are on iOS but completely worth it for me), flexible (I have a WK based deck that I‘m using for this) and not yet another app to use. You have to grade yourself on how well you did but I don’t have a problem with that.
This is not the deck I’m using, mine has all the mnemonic info etc on there too but unfortunately it is data from before the big content changes. But to give you an idea:
That app is probably the best writing option I’m aware of right now. My only real objection is that it doesn’t really do SRS on its own as far as I can tell, so you pretty much have to just do an entire list until you finish it or get bored in the middle.
Another app that I happen to have just discovered is called 「いちまると旅しよう! しりもじ漢検」; it’s apparently an official Kanji Kentei study app for levels 10-5 with cartoon non-rabbit aliens who write kanji with their tails. Beyond just writing the kanji, it also tests Kanken skills like identifying which reading to use in a sentence. It is meant for native speakers and is entirely in Japanese, though, and the 30 second time limit on questions is probably pretty tight if you’re not comfortable reading the context sentences.
Free version (which makes you watch a fullscreen add every few minutes):
Yeah, for Kanji study I use its growing system, break them up into groups of 10 and manage an srs, and using the star system to promote cards. It’s slightly manual, but works reasonably well for me once I got a system going. I’ve suggested to Chase that he implement a native SRS.
Well, I’m sorry, but I could just as well claim that you don’t want to learn more or strive for better things about being polite and respectful to people who don’t share your opinion; otherwise you’d have stopped posing your personal opinion as “cold hard truth”…
Anyway, there are lots of ways to improve one’s Japanese knowledge. Writing kanji certainly is one of such ways, and it’s a good one, but it’s not the only one. Learning to recognize kanji visually instead and using the freed time for more reading or grammar studying is a another way, and it’s not a bad way either.
Yeah, Anki is great. And I don’t even have to pay a one time fee (the PC and Android versions are officially free).
I don’t use the “scratch pad” though , instead I use a whiteboard to write the kanji and then check it with the card.
I think that is only a convenience feature that is available on mobile anyway. On the desktop they probably assume that everyone has paper or something else to write on.
I think we’re pretty much done here. If someone would like to actually talk about the benefits of learning to write kanji, feel free to start a new thread or email me about reopening this one (just mention me in an email to the general inbox and I’ll see it).