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When learning Japanese, I purposely chose to _not_ learn how to write any of it by hand. As the author notes, writing (by hand) is in fact a separate skill from

by lyall 1y ago

When learning Japanese, I purposely chose to _not_ learn how to write any of it by hand. As the author notes, writing (by hand) is in fact a separate skill from reading. So I decided I would not invest my limited time, motivation, or brain space to writing. Overall it's been a successful approach, and I recommend it to new learners unless they have a particular interest in being able to write by hand or they feel strongly that writing the characters helps them remember them. It's only rarely that I have to write anything other than my own name in Japanese. I've practiced my address but writing it in English is fine in 99% of situations. Being able to write properly would save a little embarrassment, but I still believe my language learning time would have a much higher ROI in other areas.

dodos 1y ago
The one thing I noticed when I was focusing on learning to write is that it helped me a lot with differentiating between similar characters when reading. I forget which ones now, but there are many characters that differ by a single radical and have similar meanings, knowing how to write each one helped me quite a bit there, but overall I rarely write anything other than my name and address now that I live in Japan.
- jwrallie 1y ago
  Even if you cannot recall and have to type in your phone first (as natives do often for unusual ones), at least you can write it much faster because you are not just copying. I think it’s useful to do RTK with SSR and, once you finishes, you only need about 15 min of maintenance per day to keep it in memory.
xdfgh1112 1y ago
I can confirm this. I passed N1 without learning to write. I later learned how to write all of the kanji, and all it does it help you distinguish very similar kanji without context. I tried learning all the compound words (i.e. which kanji to use for every word) but gave up a few thousand Anki cards in. It was time consuming and impractical. (Wanted to pass Kanken 2) Props for anyone who put in the work though.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  Don't drill words drill sentences (no Japanese word means an English word, and no English word means a Japanese word.) And don't fall in love with any of the sentences, move on to new sentences. Eventually the knowledge accumulates, but only through volume and variety.
  - xdfgh1112 1y ago
    If that worked for you cool. My Anki deck is a lovingly curated set of sentences that I enjoy.
timr 1y ago
I went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you, I almost completely abandoned it as soon as I didn't have to take language school tests anymore. It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards. As a partial aside, the Heisig anecdote that leads off this piece is painful: > Japanese children learn the spoken language first, then they learn how to write it in elementary school; Chinese students of Japanese (who tend to be pretty good at it) have pre-existing knowledge of character meanings and forms from their mother tongue, so they only have to learn how to pronounce them. Therefore, a Western learner should first focus only on the meaning and writing of those couple of thousand common characters and, only after having mastered those, should move on to studying the pronunciations. Going from "Japanese people learn the spoken language first" to "you should spend a big chunk of time learning characters before learning sounds, words or grammar" is a pretty remarkable mental backflip. The author says he spent eleven months doing this before devoting any time to the spoken language. If I could put the "head exploding" emoji here, I would do it. I spent only slightly more time than that at language school, and came out conversational.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  The time to grind Kanji is when you're ready to really push the breadth of your vocabulary. While you're still picking up grammar it makes more sense to just pick up kanji here and there as you encounter them.
- lyall 1y ago
  Yeah I agree. I way over-indexed on learning kanji (via WaniKani) at the beginning of my Japanese learning journey. I got about halfway through before realizing it was silly that I could read 健忘症 but didn't know many very basic hiragana-only words. It wasn't timed wasted but it probably wasn't the most efficient approach. In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then move on to kanji later. But writing is a very useful tool in learning, and having access to that tool can help speed things up. Like most things in life, a balanced approach is probably the right one. But you have to know what your goal is. Our brains are lazy, they only get better at what we make them get better at. If your goal is to just read kanji, practice reading kanji. If your goal is to understand and speak the language, practice listening to and speaking the language. But if you want to have a balanced language ability, you'll need to practice it all.
alisonatwork 1y ago
Yeah I made the same decision learning Chinese. It's just not worth the extra time and effort relative to the utility. Occasionally I still have to sign my name, so I specifically picked a name that a) was written the same in both simplified and traditional and b) had a low number of strokes. Like you, the only time this has bitten me is in hospitals and banks where occasionally they ask you to do stuff like write out your address. I sometimes exercise my dumb foreigner privilege and ask the clerk to help, but since addresses have a formal romanization method it's often fine to write that, and I've seen enough locals struggle I don't feel too bad about it.
simianparrot 1y ago
I am doing both because while learning to write the symbol for a sound/meaning and identifying the symbol’s sound/meaning are separate skills, they enhance the fluidity of _thinking_ in Japanese significantly for me. It has a synergistic effect and to me seems to improve the brain’s understanding and efficiency in compressing the knowledge. But my goal is not just to read and understand but to talk conversationally. While Japanese is very different from my other languages, I’m already multilingual (Norwegian, English, Dutch and German) and this approach has always worked best for me.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  I might have to play with writing alongside vocab reviews. Back in the earlier days of the online Japanese learning sphere (when AJATT was still the big new thing), I tried learning by starting with writing by studying kanji independently, but that went nowhere even after several months in. More recently I’ve been making a point of audibly speaking the sentences associated with vocab cards and that’s helped a lot with being able to fluidly speak the various long trains of sounds that are common in Japanese but rare in English as well for improving recall and improving reading speed. It would follow that writing might enhance that effect. My foremost goal is to become conversational too. The rest should follow more naturally if I can achieve that.
hintymad 1y ago
You strategy makes sense. Truth be told, even native Chinese and Japanese tend to forget how to write many characters as they spend more time typing than writing.
creakingstairs 1y ago
I’ve taken your approach as well but I did notice that I retain Kanjis that I learn to write significantly more than ones I can just read. But memorising all the Kanjis is a bother. I found the sweet spot to be writing on a scratch pad as I go through Anki. And not particularly worry about getting writing right too much. Sometimes I’d be confused in my head but my muscle memory would kick in and automatically write the kanji!
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> It's only rarely that I have to write anything other than my own name in Japanese. I thought they had stamps for that.
idahoduncan 1y ago
I'm following this approach. One of the most interesting things so far has been observing just how separate recall and production are. There are kanji that I can recognise instantly, and recall meanings and pronunciations, but I can't visualise them at all.
zdc1 1y ago
I'm learning traditional Chinese and found that writing helps me recognise the components and strokes when reading the same characters. If I just try and visually pattern match with flash cards, anything that's hand written or in an stylised font will throw me off. If I can sympathise with / recognise the stokes used, I find it easier to tell what character they're trying to show.
goosedragons 1y ago
It is a separate skill from reading, but I think it's still useful. At the very least learn the strokes of common radicals. In my experience things like denshi jishos can be VERY picky about how you input them. It makes word lookup much faster IMO anyways.
BrtByte 1y ago
I think your advice makes a lot of sense for most learners: prioritize the skills you'll actually use, and don't feel guilty about skipping handwriting unless it personally matters to you

by lyall 1y ago

dodos 1y ago

The one thing I noticed when I was focusing on learning to write is that it helped me a lot with differentiating between similar characters when reading. I forget which ones now, but there are many characters that differ by a single radical and have similar meanings, knowing how to write each one helped me quite a bit there, but overall I rarely write anything other than my name and address now that I live in Japan.

jwrallie 1y ago
Even if you cannot recall and have to type in your phone first (as natives do often for unusual ones), at least you can write it much faster because you are not just copying. I think it’s useful to do RTK with SSR and, once you finishes, you only need about 15 min of maintenance per day to keep it in memory.

xdfgh1112 1y ago

I can confirm this. I passed N1 without learning to write. I later learned how to write all of the kanji, and all it does it help you distinguish very similar kanji without context. I tried learning all the compound words (i.e. which kanji to use for every word) but gave up a few thousand Anki cards in. It was time consuming and impractical. (Wanted to pass Kanken 2) Props for anyone who put in the work though.

pessimizer 1y ago
Don't drill words drill sentences (no Japanese word means an English word, and no English word means a Japanese word.) And don't fall in love with any of the sentences, move on to new sentences. Eventually the knowledge accumulates, but only through volume and variety.
- xdfgh1112 1y ago
  If that worked for you cool. My Anki deck is a lovingly curated set of sentences that I enjoy.

timr 1y ago

I went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you, I almost completely abandoned it as soon as I didn't have to take language school tests anymore. It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards. As a partial aside, the Heisig anecdote that leads off this piece is painful: > Japanese children learn the spoken language first, then they learn how to write it in elementary school; Chinese students of Japanese (who tend to be pretty good at it) have pre-existing knowledge of character meanings and forms from their mother tongue, so they only have to learn how to pronounce them. Therefore, a Western learner should first focus only on the meaning and writing of those couple of thousand common characters and, only after having mastered those, should move on to studying the pronunciations. Going from "Japanese people learn the spoken language first" to "you should spend a big chunk of time learning characters before learning sounds, words or grammar" is a pretty remarkable mental backflip. The author says he spent eleven months doing this before devoting any time to the spoken language. If I could put the "head exploding" emoji here, I would do it. I spent only slightly more time than that at language school, and came out conversational.

jimbokun 1y ago
The time to grind Kanji is when you're ready to really push the breadth of your vocabulary. While you're still picking up grammar it makes more sense to just pick up kanji here and there as you encounter them.
lyall 1y ago
Yeah I agree. I way over-indexed on learning kanji (via WaniKani) at the beginning of my Japanese learning journey. I got about halfway through before realizing it was silly that I could read 健忘症 but didn't know many very basic hiragana-only words. It wasn't timed wasted but it probably wasn't the most efficient approach. In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then move on to kanji later. But writing is a very useful tool in learning, and having access to that tool can help speed things up. Like most things in life, a balanced approach is probably the right one. But you have to know what your goal is. Our brains are lazy, they only get better at what we make them get better at. If your goal is to just read kanji, practice reading kanji. If your goal is to understand and speak the language, practice listening to and speaking the language. But if you want to have a balanced language ability, you'll need to practice it all.

alisonatwork 1y ago

Yeah I made the same decision learning Chinese. It's just not worth the extra time and effort relative to the utility. Occasionally I still have to sign my name, so I specifically picked a name that a) was written the same in both simplified and traditional and b) had a low number of strokes. Like you, the only time this has bitten me is in hospitals and banks where occasionally they ask you to do stuff like write out your address. I sometimes exercise my dumb foreigner privilege and ask the clerk to help, but since addresses have a formal romanization method it's often fine to write that, and I've seen enough locals struggle I don't feel too bad about it.

simianparrot 1y ago

I am doing both because while learning to write the symbol for a sound/meaning and identifying the symbol’s sound/meaning are separate skills, they enhance the fluidity of _thinking_ in Japanese significantly for me. It has a synergistic effect and to me seems to improve the brain’s understanding and efficiency in compressing the knowledge. But my goal is not just to read and understand but to talk conversationally. While Japanese is very different from my other languages, I’m already multilingual (Norwegian, English, Dutch and German) and this approach has always worked best for me.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
I might have to play with writing alongside vocab reviews. Back in the earlier days of the online Japanese learning sphere (when AJATT was still the big new thing), I tried learning by starting with writing by studying kanji independently, but that went nowhere even after several months in. More recently I’ve been making a point of audibly speaking the sentences associated with vocab cards and that’s helped a lot with being able to fluidly speak the various long trains of sounds that are common in Japanese but rare in English as well for improving recall and improving reading speed. It would follow that writing might enhance that effect. My foremost goal is to become conversational too. The rest should follow more naturally if I can achieve that.

hintymad 1y ago

You strategy makes sense. Truth be told, even native Chinese and Japanese tend to forget how to write many characters as they spend more time typing than writing.

creakingstairs 1y ago

I’ve taken your approach as well but I did notice that I retain Kanjis that I learn to write significantly more than ones I can just read. But memorising all the Kanjis is a bother. I found the sweet spot to be writing on a scratch pad as I go through Anki. And not particularly worry about getting writing right too much. Sometimes I’d be confused in my head but my muscle memory would kick in and automatically write the kanji!

thaumasiotes 1y ago

> It's only rarely that I have to write anything other than my own name in Japanese. I thought they had stamps for that.

idahoduncan 1y ago

I'm following this approach. One of the most interesting things so far has been observing just how separate recall and production are. There are kanji that I can recognise instantly, and recall meanings and pronunciations, but I can't visualise them at all.

zdc1 1y ago

I'm learning traditional Chinese and found that writing helps me recognise the components and strokes when reading the same characters. If I just try and visually pattern match with flash cards, anything that's hand written or in an stylised font will throw me off. If I can sympathise with / recognise the stokes used, I find it easier to tell what character they're trying to show.

goosedragons 1y ago

It is a separate skill from reading, but I think it's still useful. At the very least learn the strokes of common radicals. In my experience things like denshi jishos can be VERY picky about how you input them. It makes word lookup much faster IMO anyways.

BrtByte 1y ago

I think your advice makes a lot of sense for most learners: prioritize the skills you'll actually use, and don't feel guilty about skipping handwriting unless it personally matters to you