Rather, take them as ‘cold hard facts’!
Sorry, just had to 
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We don’t lack this ability. In fact, I totally agree with the boldened part.
What we disagree on is that you take your personal (and quite controversial) opinion
And pose it as a “cold hard fact” without accepting even the slightest possibility that you might be wrong.
The really sad part is that if you had omitted that so-colled “cold hard fact” and just said this
you wouldn’t have lost anything, but would have gained a lot. Your post wouldn’t have insulted anyone, nobody would have made an impression of, as you put it, “attacking the opinion as if it was worthless”.
You wouldn’t have got any stains on your reputation in this community and would have seen that it is in fact one of the nicest communities on the Internet. As long as you respect others’ feelings and opinions here, yours would be respected too!
But you just had to go and try to force your redefinition of “knowing Kanji” on us, and now you probably think that this community consists of “bullies and prigs”, which couldn’t be farther from truth…
P. S.
I’m sorry too, I wish I could formulate my words better, so that they would reach you and make you understand that posing your opinion as the “harsh reality” is not a right thing to do, no matter how sure you are of it… Anyway, thank you for apologizing. I think that it’s a small, but very important step in the right direction.
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Agreed. That sounds like a valid opinion that way, one I can agree with. There’s still some room for discussion too (writing is a nice way to reinforce the recognition part, but it’s not the only way; once again it’s a matter of personal goals and preferences; you can learn to read all 常用 kanji then learn to write them; etc).
To bad they decided to be aggressive and muddy up the message.
(And thank you @trunklayer for being the voice of reason here, I’m pretty sure everyone else had given up on this thread ;))
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I don’t think he is, really. He’s just good with people, and knows how to connect with them at a visceral level 
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Every morning I check to see if this thread is locked. And every morning…
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Well, this has been a fun thread to read 
. I’d like to add my own two cents on this. I grew up in a bilingual environment so both Hindi and English are equally ‘native’ for me. However, due to lack of practice (read ‘laziness’) and aversion to writing in general, my handwriting in both languages is barely legible, even for me. However, I don’t hesitate at all in calling myself proficient in both those languages. I am a follower of AJATT and MIA approaches and wholeheartedly agree with their methods.
It’s not that I am against writing Kanji, but I just don’t feel like it is something I need to do right now or at any point in near future. That might change if I ever decide to go to Japan or work there, though. Furthermore, I have never observed myself having a much better retention by writing than by reading. Considering all this, I’d say whether or not Kanji is worth writing is largely dependent on the person, their circumstances and their goals with learning Japanese.
As for ‘knowing’ a language, or anything at all, I want to point out that “Recognition” and “Recall” are two different forms of memory retrieval and both have their own use. For example, even though the human brain has been wired after hundreds of millions of generations to tune itself for human faces, we are much better at recognizing faces than recalling them. In fact, a huge chunk of people we’ll meet in our lifetimes will only ever be recognized by us and not recalled. The written word, in comparison, is a fairly new and abstract concept to the brain. Methinks it’s too harsh to say that one doesn’t know a language if one can’t write it (even if one can read it decently). It’s not exactly being illiterate but it’s not being an expert either.
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I’ve tried learning by writing before, but it was painfully slow.
But I’ll try again once I hit lvl60. It sucks not being able to write 
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Beautiful.Very Accurate.
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Not just. I want to watch other things too. I mean, the world burning is ok. It’s up there. But, GOT season 8, more Rick and Morty on the way? End Game? Wallow in destruction one time and people think they know you. Jeez.
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I do think it’s worth pointing out here that the whole premise of WK’s methodology is that you don’t “really know” kanji if you can pick them out of a multiple-choice quiz, and you need to actually be able to type their readings or meanings in manually before you can claim to know them. Which is pretty much the same thing as what @Sutho81 is saying, just going kanji → meaning instead of meaning → kanji.
(Also, having now learned the HTML entity for a right-pointing arrow, I am always going to pronounce that symbol in my head as “Rarr!” henceforth.)
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Agreed. I think the problem is his delivery, and that he implies anything less than hand writing them as you learn them is worthless. No allowance is left for prioritizing learning tasks based on value to the individual, or separation of tasks in the first place.
I think that’s steelmanning his argument to an absurd degree. If his argument was merely that you know it to a larger degree because you can write it, then sure. No doubt. You know how to read and write it, which clearly additional knowledge over being able to read it.
But his claim is the far weaker “you don’t know” a kanji if you can’t write it. In fact, if you can’t write it, then you just don’t know how to write it. But if you can read it, you know how to read it.
His argument is redefining “know” to include being able to write, which is just a rhetorical trick. Everyone is really arguing over definitions. He’s making up his own definition, which is absurd on its face. As I pointed out elsewhere, if you accept his definition, anyone physical unable to write a character (due to a disability, etc.) literally cannot “know” a kanji. Clearly that is ridiculous.
On the other hand, saying you don’t “know” a character if you’re unable to produce the meaning/reading without actually being given the answer as a part of the question is a far stronger claim, and is certainly not remotely equivalent to his assertion.
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But how much of that is just a delivery problem? Does he actually intend to make up his own definition, or is he not able to articulate his thoughts in a way which is consumable by others? That is, assuming he isn’t intentionally trying to offend people.
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He backed off his ludicrous assertion at one point to the more defensible stance that writing it is helpful, and when that was pointed out to him, he reasserted the original “do not know” as “cold hard fact.” So I don’t think it’s mostly a problem with delivery at all.
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So, just overbearing, or trolling? 
One of the great unanswerable questions of our time.
All else being equal, I prefer to assume people are sincere and merely wrong, but who can say for sure?
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I’d hope he is trolling. Because if he is not, I’d assume that he is not very reflective in his opinions and behaviors. And that is sad. His deliberatel use of words such as “cold fact”, “harsh reality” or whatever, leads me to believe he is trying to trigger people on purpose. And then, very selective in whom he answers and what, ignoring the attempts to make him reflect, going for distractions and insults (“I don’t believe you are Japan, etc.”).
So far, still amusing, this thread.
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Ouch.
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“Ouch?” You don’t have to do anything anymore, as apparently most Japanese learning endeavours count towards you and your proficiency!
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