Worth writing kanji?

It’s clearly a personal matter, and depends on why you are learning the language I suppose. I’ll just say that for me writing kanji and kana is a deeply gratifying aesthetic experience and a skill I would no longer wish to be without. I also believe that it helps you to remember both the kanji themselves and the wildly annoying WaniKani radicals!

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Personally it depends for what purpose you want to use the Kanji knowledge.
For me it worked when I was learning Hiragana and Katakana and now I’m able to read them more and more fluently. Same with the Kanji. It helps recognise and it’s like an extra layer memorisation for me. Though I’m writing down not just the Kanji, but atleast a sample sentence.
I realised that helped immensely remembering the meaning. So when multiple Kanji words starting to appear I could form by individual pieces. So for me it’s rewarding to do so.
Yes it is very time consuming, but good things requires time. So I didn’t regret doing so at all.

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I totally agree, pity you’ve removed that post; I don’t think there is anything wrong with it.

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If you all just stop responding to him, he’ll die, like the Old Gods. He is feeding on your butthurt.

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I find it funny when people take their own personal goals, desires, and self-imposed requirements for Japanese and insist on applying them to everyone else. As if there’s no chance for people having differing ambitions or personal values when it comes to the language. You have to be pretty high and mighty to think everyone should follow your own routine and embrace all the things you embrace.

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Am I late to the party? :sob:

But I wanteddd the cake everyone is having…

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Writing it with four strokes just means you have to randomly lift your pen at one corner for no particular reason, right? If one stroke ends at the same spot where the next one begins, you might as well keep drawing that same stroke.

The problem with writing it with two strokes is that you’d likely have to drag your pen across the diagonal of the square, which risks accidentally making marks in the middle of it and making it look like a different kanji. A bigger deal with a brush than with modern pens, sure, but I think it would still be not too hard to make errors like that when writing quickly. At least with the official three-stroke technique, you’re always lifting your pen along lines where you’ve already drawn a stroke or are about to draw one, so you don’t have to be quite so careful.

More importantly, though… there’s not much about kanji that’s easy to organize. Having an agreed-upon standard for stroke count matters, because it’s pretty much the easiest attribute of a kanji to look up in a reference. And if you’re going to be looking up unknown kanji in reference materials, you’ll pretty much need to know how to guess the official stroke count. (I’m not sure, but I think even the fancy handwriting lookup methods today don’t do very well if you don’t use something pretty close to the right number of strokes.)

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That’s why I deleted it. I responded immediately after I read that post, but after reading all the other responses that followed, I felt like everything had been said already and I was just feeding the troll.

But since it has a reply now, I restored it.

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That is exactly how I feel about learning to write it. Learning something is a benefit not a detriment and it always has been this way. The disappointing thing for me when I aired my views was having all the bullies and prigs attack the opinion as if it was worthless.

What I can add is that the biggest misconception about writing Kanji is that it is extremely difficult and time consuming. The truth is it is not time consuming and not difficult and even the most difficult looking Kanji can be written with considerable ease.

examples like 飛行機 where the final Kanji in hikouki looks like it would be difficult to write, it is actually quite easy because the top part is a repetitive condensed form of thread 糸 The next one here which looks difficult is actually considerably easy to write 愛 the bottom part of it is essentially the following two Kanji 心 友 condensed and elongated on top of each other. By learning to write even the basic Kanji the same principal follows through for the more advanced Kanji.

People can be very good at memorising patterns and may be able to pick up Kanji really good in digital form, but taking it to another level and actually learning how to write it greatly improves your ability to remember and gives you the added ability to recreate.

My opinion is that it is a benefit - definitely
Will it help learning Kanji - definitely
Will it prevent you from learning - not at all
Will it slow you down - not at all

Each to their own as to whether they decide to write it or not. That is not my issue and it is their choice of what they get out of it. I am fine with that. What I am not fine with is having people who have never put pen to paper with Kanji and try and say that it is not a benefit. It is a benefit and it is impossible not to be a benefit because by nature learning something new is always a benefit and not a detriment.

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Can you tell me what I need to do to be able to write kanji, since my current level isn’t good enough to meet your standards. Presumably you saw other threads where I talk about writing. I’m eager to learn!

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I honestly do not have the slightest idea of what you are talking about.

How does writing Kanji is an improvement/benefit translate into “you are not good enough”???

Perhaps trolling and looking for trouble or just plain jealous that other people want to take things to another standard and learn to write it and venting your frustrations out on other peoples ambitions because it makes you feel insignificant and insecure when you find other people do actually take the time to learn to write it.

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People have taken issue with your stance because of the way you presented it - stating that you don’t know kanji if you cannot write them, accusing them of not really being in Japan or not really having a certain level of writing ability. Surely you can understand why that would rub people the wrong way. Perhaps you need a little more introspection. :slight_smile:

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Accusing other people of trolling is pretty rich. Over the course of this thread, you went from outright stating that if you can’t write a kanji, you can’t possibly actually know it, to saying “What I am not fine with is having people who have never put pen to paper with Kanji and try and say that it is not a benefit.” and accusing people of bullying you for disagreeing.

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I for one think that writting might have a lot of benefits too, but by reading your previous posts it looks you’re putting writting in a pedestal for what it really is, specially nowdays in Japan, as a skill… and even more for second language learners.

On a learning language perspective, kanji reading recognition is more of a pattern recognition thing for what I’ve read, where the brain pick up blocks of images (words) without going for the detail while reading. Actually in this way reading japanese can be really effective once you become used to this patterns. Rapid reading courses in japanese rely on exactly this actually. I’ve been reading this book aiming at that. I would actually suggest first even a speed reading course than writting for reading practice.

That been said I’m taken shodo classes currently and while I find different styles fascinating and I see marginal benefits while wondering the streets in Japan it’s not a recommendation that I would do to anyone starting japanese, or with a tight schedule to learn… or mostly anyone that doesn’t manifest an specific insterest in it… It’s an interest of mine, hardly a requisit in the japanese learning curriculum imo.
Then again it’s my opinion based on my preferences and needs of japanese currently. Someone coming to study in a japanese university, a university teacher, or something like that… I would guess would think better about the benefits they could take out of learning how to write at a higher level of proficiency.

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You claimed I “hammered you” because I can’t write kanji. You wouldn’t claim to know that without any actual idea, though, right?

I can write kanji, so… Yeah, not sure why you assumed that anyone who disagrees with your (previously?) absolute stance can’t write kanji.

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Woah, I did not expect to see intense discourse on a forum dedicated to language learning!

I’m going to jump in, because I have opinions and I don’t like being left out :sweat_smile:
I write cursive, in English. I love writing in cursive because I like the aesthetic and writing in print tires out my hand more than cursive does. That doesn’t mean that cursive is necessary for people to learn in school, especially since nowadays so many people only type and barely hand write anything. If you write in cursive, cool! Neat handwriting is impressive. But is it necessary? Not really, and the hours that are spent practicing perfect sizes, strokes, and slant could be dedicated to other, more useful aspects, like grammar and punctuation.

I feel the same way about kanji. It looks neato burrito, I’m always super impressed when someone can do calligraphy or something, but it’s not the most important thing to prioritize. I’d rather spend that time learning something I can use in my job and in day to day conversations with people who speak Japanese.

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So I just started WaniKani literally today, but I have been learning kanji for around 6 months before this (I think I know around 150). In this time, I realized that there is a difference in knowing how to recognize a kanji and being able to recall it independently of any visual stimuli. To elaborate, sometimes I will think that I have learned a kanji because I can read it when I come across it in sentences. However, even if I can successfully read it, I can’t always picture it in my head without taking a peek at the kanji itself. If I repeatedly practice writing that kanji, then I find that I can envision every little detail of the kanji in mind without having to look at it.

Personally, I want to get to the point where I can envision a kanji in my head just as easily as I can envision English letters (albeit English letters are much less complicated). So I’d say if you would like to get to this level as well, then it would be best to write out the kanji now while you’re learning them even if you don’t think you will hand-write Japanese in the future.

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Hi! Welcome to WaniKani!

I understand what you mean haha I’ve only been using WaniKani for a couple months now and I can say with confidence that it will help you to better visualize Kanji in your head. At least it did for me. My advice is to pay extra mind to the mnemonics of your radicals as you progress. You can even give them your own names and mnemonics to help you remember! This is especially handy when you come across two kanji that look similar but have different radicals to the left of them. ( 他 vs 池 is a good example of this).

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Hey, I wasn’t sure if you are merely trolling or just someone immature and on a high horse. Yeah, well, you are trolling. Thanks mate for clarifying this … won’t waste my energy on your posts anymore.

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I stand 100% by the statement that people do not know Kanji if they cannot write it.

It is a true fact that if you cannot recreate it then you simply do not know it. You may be able to recognise it in print, but being able to recreate it is a whole different matter.

You either know it or you don’t know it. If you cannot recreate it then you do not know it plain and simple. It doesn’t matter if you can recognise it as that is only half of the learning process. You need to be able to recreate it to be able to know it. If you cannot recreate it then it means that you do not understand the patter on the Kanji and how it is written. That is why it is beneficial to write it because it reinforces the fact that you know it and that it is not just a facade.

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