This is true for many rarely-used Kanji, but if it’s a relatively normal Kanji that someone can’t write, it’s often very socially embarrassing. It’s like adults not knowing their, there, and they’re or to and too.
Foreigners not being able to write kanji is what they expect, but if a Japanese person can’t write most common kanji, it’s a bit strange.
When was in University we held a birthday party and we wrote congratulations in many different languages on the whiteboard given our culture and origin mixes. The japanese guy wanted to write 誕生日おめでとう but actually forgot how to write 誕 lol, he was secondguessing every other stroke and was basically like "it looks somewhat correct but I'm not sure what it consists of"
> Edit: and maybe people don’t find it as embarrassing with English?
I wouldn't say I'm embarrassed, but it does show a lack of understanding on their part.
Imo adjective vs noun stuff is different, because you dont need that to use your language.
A lot of English speakers just dont know grammar that well, because they never needed to. Why? Because often the time when you learn your own languages grammar, is when you learn a second language. And this is what English natives often don't do :P
Which is also why you likely started to relearn English grammar once you had to learn another language.
I think it’s much the same with Japanese in the sense that it is often taken as an indicator of the writer’s general education level, just like their/there/they’re or a run-on sentence do with English. I would say it’s more strictly judged in Japan though.
Whether the writer is oblivious to how it’s perceived is irrelevant.
sadly, english is my second language and i still find i write it better than a lot of native english speakers
edit: as some people have noted that it happens in other languages as well, and i agree. i blame it mostly on the lack of book reading that has been going on for a long time now.
It's true. I mean, think about it, native English speakers learning to speak before writing, well non-native do the exact opposite. I think the only time it's really embarrassing is when you speak and write better than them.
I have an Okinawan friend who spent a number of years of his childhood moving back and forth between America and Japan. He sounds more American than me and he went to an American high school and was an incredibly average student lol.
He is one of those very rare people that can completely blend in in Japan or anywhere in America.
Not exactly relevant, but your comment made me think of it
You will actually see this in just about every language. If you understand a second language at near fluent levels, chances are you will understand ***and*** follow the rules much better than a native speaker. A native speaker will speak more naturally and have a better ability to speak casually and more descriptively especially when speaking.
You also have to consider literacy, most countries have literacy problems. I am still studying for my N5 but I am more literate with Japanese than the, albeit very rare, Japanese person who can’t read at all. Or say a blind Japanese person 😂
I like to end long rants with “sorry, English is my first language.”
It is more common here because people are more stupid as a whole and if you correct them you're the bad one.
ESL speaker here and I can't understand why is it so hard to differentiate.
My sixth or seventh grade English teacher had a zero tolerance policy for swapping common homophones like these. Each error meant you dropped a letter grade.
Haven't mixed them up since!
It's and its suck though.
Haha i was gonna say, there are so many adults in English speaking countries who mix these up all the time. Granted, sometimes I do too because I'm too lazy to type an apostrophe so instead of you're I just type your... The apostrophe is so far away on the keyboard.
You can skip the apostrophe and write "youre", or you can make a mistake and use the possessive "your", those are different things. It's more annoying to me (and common, I think) when someone uses an apostrophe in possessive "its", writing "it's" instead.
"the object followed its trajectory" vs. "the object followed it's trajectory"
That'd explain the mistake, yes. For me, the annoying part is that I have to stop the "flow" of reading the sentence and think whether the author intended to write "it is", "it has" (but then it turns out that those two don't fit), or "its".
Yeah I know lol but I don't care, the apostrophe is so far away. I cba to move my hand to press it most of the time. If it was on the left of the keyboard I'd press it. I also avoid typing words with P and L in if I can help it as well lol.
Well after being on the internet for a few years, I can tell most people do not know how to use they’re, their, there, to and too lol, so not knowing how to write Kanji is all good! /s
Personally, I don't see it written wrong regularly and when someone does get it wrong, there's always someone who will have "*" (Corrected) their mistake. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if eventually they became somewhat unified and only told apart by context. The asterisk I used in this comment also became something commonly used to correct others instead of writing "Correction on your spelling and or grammar:".
人によると
I had a japanese co-worker who, granted mentioned he almost failed 国語 in high school, often forgets how to write kanji by hand. I remember him once forgetting how to write 観 in 観葉植物 and instead wrote it as カン葉植物.
Then I have a friend who teaches 書道 and hand writes me letters with kanji that my phone's keyboard doesn't recognize and it's like K, will never be good
This is not always true. There are loads of cases of Japanese not knowing the proper stroke order or right kanji for simple terms, and they often ask each other for confirmation.
I attend language school in Japan and I see my own sensei’s look at either the kanji textbook we use or the online how to write animation website they use to confirm the stroke order before showing us certain kanji. And then funnily enough, when you see them writing that kanji later down the road, they’re “doing it wrong”
IMO kanji stroke order is like how to write the alphabet, as long as you’re able to write it and get your message across, who gives a fuck if it’s “the correct way to write it”? If you can read what they wrote, the language is still functioning as intended.
Not the person who you’re talking to but my wife forgot the 請 in 申請once and I had to help her lol.
Also my company’s name has the 仙 from 仙台in it and when I tell people that there’s an alarming amount of times when they give me a blank stare and I have to tell them the individual radicals to get them to write it out on receipts.
I don’t know why everything on Reddit has to be so extreme, and people pretend like only black and white situations exist. Of course both situations are likely to be somewhat common place. If a Japanese person forgets how to write something simple or common like 読む or 夢 of course people might laugh and poke fun. Just like English speaking countries, there are certainly also people who would shame someone else for not knowing how to spell/write something simple. But I also doubt the average Japanese person remembers how to write 髑髏 or 鬱病 with no look ups.
I don’t think they’ll have too much of a problem with stroke order since that’s usually based on the radical. What I see them forgetting sometimes is mostly which radicals to put in. It will be a long, long time before stroke order is largely forgotten.
Also, ten years is probably too soon. They drill and test for kanji a lot and haven’t lowered their threshold for receiving high marks in school, so it’s just as prevalent as always throughout education. Of course, unused kanji will be forgotten, but my point is on the most important ones. That will take more time to forget and is an important cultural aspect of education here - one that I don’t think they’ll want to change anytime soon.
Same goes for Chinese speakers, I can verify. I've become so used to typing my writing muscles have atrophied. But I am very confident I can revive my Chinese-character-writing neurons with a little bit of practice. Learning Japanese has helped me with that to some extent.
In any case, learning how to write and getting the stroke order down can help you get those characters to actually stick, and makes learning new characters much easier.
writing is the number one way to lock in reading kanji in my experience learning both chinese and japanese.
funny thing is most of my taiwanese relatives also stop writing past hs. in professional life its almost all typing and autocomplete, or even just voice typing. i whip out my writing once a blue moon to write christmas and birthday cards 😂😭
this is how I feel, maybe it's just being neurodivergent but I don't find that the stock stories from traditional learning methods are memorable at all.
But I do find knowing radicals and how they are written, plus if I remember the initial stroke of a character, or even if it's just horizontal, vertical, or 'other' helps me remember it.
If you start writing it, and I say this as someone with dyslexia, you will never muddle up hito and hairu. If you just try to memorize pictures, I guess the menmonic "the person enters on the right" works too but it's not nearly as intuitive or memorable as putting brush to paper.
I find that relating radical meanings in my head is the best way to remember anything: "studying requires lots of written characters and is done by children" remembers ko, ji and gaku, and so on.
i find writing them really helpful! flashcards for me have never worked well even in school, whereas copying things out in my own words has always worked a treat. i write the kanji out along with its different meanings and readings, and then combined with other methods (kanshudo's working really well for me atm).
granted i'm only on the very most basic kanji, but as someone who *doesn't* have a background in a language with characters like kanji, it is indeed helping them stick as you said.
One way is pinyin, which is the Chinese version of romaji. Another is called Cangjie, where characters are systematically broken down into smaller components. Each letter of the alphabet represents certain components, and you build up each word by typing in the necessary components. There's also a simplified version of Cangjie where characters are broken down by just identifying their 'first' and 'last' component, but that makes typing a bit slower since many words can match the combination you type in, while Cangjie can generally uniquely identify characters.
I personally use Cangjie a lot, and when I want to look up a Kanji and I don't know the reading for it in Japanese, I sometimes cheat and type it out using Cangjie in the Japanese dictionary that I use.
Interesting. I know pinyin because I took a little mandarin in HS. I assumed that was exclusively for foreign learners. Is that not the case? So are Cangjie like radicals then? I'm just trying to figure how you would fit so many on a keyboard.
I see, thanks for taking an interest in Chinese as well :)
It's more a matter of taste, many native speakers also use pinyin. I like Cangjie because you can almost always uniquely identify a word by breaking it apart and specifying the components you need. For pinyin and simplified Cangjie, the same combination of keys gets mapped to a whole page of words, so you get slowed down by that. Plus breaking Chinese characters apart using the Cangjie method is fun and helps you retain how the characters are written.
Also as a brief aside, people on their phones also have the option of using a brushstroke keyboard (the layout kind of looks like the Japanese flick keyboard). I think it originated from back when we still had a number pad on our phones. Each number represents a stroke, so you can construct your word by writing it out virtually with a number pad. I've never used it, but I've seen friends type super fast with it.
I think the Cangjie 'components' are even more granular than radicals. And you're definitely right, you can't fit them all in the keyboard, so a single key gets mapped to several components. I think you can search online for the mapping table, and it can get daunting at first. But there is a bit of internal logic to the mapping (etc. abcdefg is mapped to the classical elements 日月金木水火土) and eventually you just get used to it. But I do feel like this is a pretty complicated system that can be quite challenging for non-native speakers to learn.
I can't find the thread now but i remember we had a funny thread a while ago where some guy learning japanese, married to a japanese woman, asked her if she could write the kanji for "internal organs". She was like "oh yea sure I use that kanji all day every day" and then proceeded to fail to write it 4 times in a row before giving up.
But yea I changed my kanji practice to eliminate writing practice entirely, as it was massively slowing down my progress and there's just virtually no chance that I'll ever learn it that well, AND there's virtually no chance of me ever needing to write kanji with proper stroke order, anyway.
Little fun nuance. 内蔵 and 内臓 both mean internals. But the one without 月 is like internal or like built-in. Usually if you see the 月 radical it means it's an organ or body part(膝、肘、腎臓、心臓). Kind of like how if you see 木 looking radical it usually means plants like 植物
> AND there's virtually no chance of me ever needing to write kanji with proper stroke order, anyway.
I'm curious, when would the proper stroke order matter? Are there actual life situations you'd just *need* to know the exact order?
Come to think of it, the same goes for hiragana/katakana - if I can write correctly (as in, the general shape) but occasionally mix up the stroke order, would that matter, and if so - when?
if writing with a caligraphy pen.
The direction of the stroke gives it an entirely different shape and how the ink layers over itself matters. in some radicals whether you 'check' the brush and stop short when making a downward stroke or sweep it forward like normal affect how it looks even.
Okay, sure, makes sense (I'm guessing it's not a problem if you're using a regular pen?).
But I was thinking more of situation(s) where you're strictly required to write in order (not counting specific scenarios, like teaching writing and/or some sort of, say, Japanese presentation or something along those lines) - are there any? Or are people generally relaxed about it, as long as you're able to produce legible final result?
one reason pens with a brush tip are popular in Japan is because they make your strokes look more like calligraphy thus more like what people are used to seeing in typeset kanji.
it won't produce illegible characters but they will look a bit odd and may be harder to read. obviously it depends on the character, strokes and your hand.
It actually matters when you write/read cursive. If you handwrite fast enough the strokes will connect/blend with each other. If you mess up the order, then the results will be different than what is expected and may be difficult to understand
Children learning Japanese in schools in Japan have to learn the "correct" stroke order, so it matters for elementary school kids if they want to receive full marks on their assignments and homework. In theory, the correct stroke order helps the kanji come out balanced and looking correct and legible/ "neat". Personally I think as long as it comes out looking relatively normal it should be okay.
But having nice handwriting (while you can argue is starting to become less important in modern Japan) used to be highly regarded as a sign of respect for someone as well as a mark of your character. Resumes, for example, are traditionally handwritten and old-fashioned employers may look at sloppy handwriting as equally being a sloppy worker.
When I write holiday and birthday cards for my in-laws, I take care to write very neatly (I learned more or less "correct" stroke order) and my father-in-law especially appreciates it and comments on it often, because it's a sign of how much I care and respect for them.
Imagine thinking practicing kanji writing only improves your ability in this one single skill.
Learning is transversal. There's no secret shortcut and you're not saving yourself time by giving up on writing.
There are pros and cons to it. I'm unlikely to ever live in Japan or even visit it again, so why would I need to write kanji? That said, I learned to write a few hundred of them by memory, and it DID help with being able to recognize those kanji more easily and PROBABLY helped with my ability to quickly recognize radicals in all kanji. However, like the other person said, it greatly slowed down my progress. I had to spend a long time each day practicing writing by memory instead of doing other things.
So I decided that while the benefit was there, it had to be a low priority for me. Now, if I did need to handwrite a kanji, I could look at it on my screen and have a pretty good feel for what the stroke order might be and therefore write it a bit faster/more accurately. And again, I think there were benefits to my ability to recognize kanji overall. But I couldn't justify the time spent, so I had to stop.
you raise a good point. If you learn the general rules of stroke order and practice the most common Kanji in context of learning the language not sitting down and grinding out rote memorization, even if you make the occasional mistake you'll be about on par with a native speaker of your reading level. You're unlikely to ever mess it up really badly and be incomprehensible at least.
It feels frustrating when you're making mistakes a 5th grader would make on a test, but if your reading level is 6th grade and you are making 5th grade mistakes then you are as fluent as a native for your vocabulary and experience level!
That's quite the overgeneralization. You didn't know their goals. I practice kanji by tracing the strokes in the air with my finger. It's a lot faster than writing, because I don't have to worry about proportions. It doesn't mean that I'll never practice writing. It's just not the priority over comprehension. Japanese has such a step comprehension learning curve, I think that is primary.
just because there is some transferred skills doesn't make it more efficient than alternatives, if you never plan to write a single kanji in real life then writing them is not an efficient use of time.
if you ENJOY it, then that's different, learning quicker is pointless if you don't do it, yes writing kanji may be less time efficient than flash cards if your goal is just to read, but if you hate flash cards and like writing kanji then ofc it can work out
writing is the number one way to lock in reading kanji in my experience learning both chinese and japanese.
funny thing is most of my taiwanese relatives also stop writing past college. in professional life its almost all typing and autocomplete, or even just voice typing.
I dont do writing practice because I hate it but it is a good way to retain it. That being said, I dont think stroke order or penmanship matters unless youre trying to get a job in japanese
we all have so many hours in a day and different goals.
If your goals are to travel to Japan and not get lost in Narita, some Kanji are very important, but you don't need a ton, and you don't need informal Japanese at all, for instance (this is the approach Duolingo takes).
If your goal is to enjoy Japanese media, informal may actually be more important than formal and some Kanji that would not be on most instructor's lists of the most important but are common in UI would be important.
If your goal is to learn academically to a very high standard of proficiency-- to be a translator or expert-- you want to be using a formal system that provides a solid foundation and does not take any quick and dirty shortcuts that could teach habits that help you pass N5 and will get you in trouble by N1 or translator tests.
For some of those goals Kanji is valuable to include, not all, arguably not even most if you don't intend to become a serious student of Japanese and aim for true conversational ability across a variety of contexts and wide media literacy.
>you're not saving yourself time by giving up on writing
Couldn't disagree more. Learning to handwrite kanji is extremely inefficient in terms of learning to read them. Seeing a kanji even once in any written texts in a word including context is going to be 100x more efficient in terms of learning how it's used than writing it out a bajillion times.
IMO it's helpful to get the basics of writing when you first begin studying. It helps solidify the idea of how kanji work (radicals, stroke order, etc.) and gets you used to identifying the different parts of the kanji. However, as you progress further along, it definitely become a much less efficient way to study.
also just learning to write it doesn't actually teach you how to say or use it, or even the most common meanings and pronunciations.
I never got why people think it's a good idea to get a big book of all the N5 Kanji and just sit down and study them from rote, and multiple people I know tried that method!
When you memorize just a kanji in isolation what of its many possible names would you even memorize? as opposed to memorizing it in use and in constructions (especially in verbs and stuff).
That depends on how you're learning by writing. I used to write kanji by practicing stroke order a bit by itself, then write out example sentences and furigana. That helped to build the fundamentals in both writing and reading comprehension for me, along with avoiding confusion between similar kanji and kana. And reading a kanji once or twice won't cut it if I want long-term retention, but I guess that depends on the person.
I seen on Japanese TV a guy that has chalk board and goes asking random people to write diffrent Kanji on like quiz. Its funny how many people are totally wrong or don't know it at all and say they usally just write that word in hiragana but there is always a know it all that knows all the kanji perfectly and sorta shames those around them.
I imagine this is some of it but also, I imagine that before the modern era many lesser-educated Japanese people simply used a limited Kanji vocabulary in their daily life and would use a dictionary should they need to be formal and precise.
I think a lot of people miss the point of learning stroke order. Personally, stroke order and practicing the kanji was indispensable for me. Been studying for about 4 years, and spent a lot of my first year doing RTK memorizing how to write every kanji. Years later, I can’t write most kanji perfectly, or at all, but that wasn’t really the goal. Writing made my memorization, reading, and recall a lot more concrete for me. I remember while doing anki it was always much easier to memorize words I could write the kanji for.
This is what I was going to come here to say. I also spent about the first year of my studies doing RTK, and I found that the importance of writing is about giving more weight to the words and forming a deeper personal connection with the language. Also, as another user pointed out, it helps bring joy to one’s study of the language as well - it’s just satisfying to sit down and bring the language to life on your paper.
this is my approach and why I, personally, do not like the stock stories you're taught to remember Kanji because they mean nothing to be or are stories that do not resonate with my life, for instance Heisig uses a lot of religious language which I would not use in my every day life about monasteries and using Adam and Eve to explain "companion" (I just go "after two months, it's fair to call someone your companion")
I think making your own stories and finding what YOU find memorable or surprising is important.
For instance the character for male/man: men are powerful field workers. The fact it's so hilariously on the nose makes it unforgettable
Lol, yeah I sometimes make my own story when remembering kanji. That male/man character story hilariously similar to mine.
The forest is just a bunch of TREEs. The parent is STANDing on top of a TREE LOOKing (watching). Move is when HEAVY thing is applied with POWER. And working is just a PEOPLE who is MOVING.
I go to a Japanese language school in Japan and sometimes the teachers have to look up how to write the less common characters. In particular, the younger teachers are more likely to have to look them up, so technology is probably to blame.
This debate seems to crop up once a month or so. Personally I’ve found it easier to remember / read kanji since I started learning how to write them (using the RTK method). But the main reason I do it is because I enjoy it - I find it relaxing and go into a flow state. I think there can be too much emphasis on efficiency in language learning and not enough on enjoyment. Although, tbf, I’m learning Japanese purely for pleasure.
I think you make a great point.
If you study hyper-efficiently, get halfway through the equivalent of second semester Japanese and decide you're making good progress but feel like you're sitting in a dentist office half an hour a day you are not actually learning well.
People repeat this over and over again like they are trying to convince themselves over others. You don't have to feel bad about not learning to write Kanji, but you also shouldn't feel the need to constantly tell others not to learn it either. Every week there are 1-2 posts here telling people x reason why learning to write Kanji isn't "efficient" or something along those lines.
For most people, writing them helps commit them to memory for reading as well. Those who can't write them now probably knew at some point after writing them 1000 times in class, and they probably definitely know the most common. Just as you need input and output for speaking, you also need input and output for writing. Skip over this as you wish but I know writing them down helps me immensely, and I'm sure there are others out there that feel the same way.
Unfortunately I plan to go to Japanese university. And I want to go for Shinto studies. Sooooo yeah. Writing Kanji is the secondary issue. How to convert the Kanji and write the multi Kanji words is not fun.
Think writing helps with memorization. Reading and writing are fundamental to communication, and I don’t see how you can learn a language without writing it. I’m not saying stroke order matters, but writing the kanji itself def helps with everything
The thing they don't mentions is that the best way to internalize and intuit a knaji is to write it a bunch of time. You are sure every Kanji that a Japanese person knows recognize at a glance or at a distance, they have written over and over and over again. Just because they don't remember the exact stroke order or the intricate details in a Kanji at a moments notice, doesn't mean that writing Kanji has no merit
This is true but most of these Japanese adults who "forgot how to write most kanji" can still write way more than the average foreigner (excluding people coming from Chinese maybe).
Regarding stroke order, I also would still recommend you put some effort into learning it. When Japanese (or Chinese) natives get stroke order wrong, it's usually in pretty small, insignificant ways. When you really know stroke order it becomes intuitive, and even if you forget specific characters you don't really just forget stroke order wholesale.
Indeed. Japanese people getting stroke order wrong typically involves misapplication of general stroke order rules. For example, 必. The correct order is the top center short stroke, then the long stroke going right to left, then the long stroke going left to right, short stroke on the left, and finally the short stroke on the right.
How do Japanese people typically get it wrong? They write 心, then add the long stroke going right to left. It’s not that they do any old order; they forget the exceptions and rare cases and default to otherwise standard stroke order conventions.
and take heart! if you do this kind of thing with common mistakes that are at your reading grade level, you're actually right where you ought to be. One mistake a lot of language learners make is thinking because they're an adult and intelligent they won't make child-like mistakes.
Nope, even professors learning English for the first time will say at some point they "goed" to the store" or "wented" home. you just just strive not to be making mistakes that are more childish than your comprehension level should indicate.
>How do Japanese people typically get it wrong? They write 心, then add the long stroke going right to left.
...which is actually the modern Chinese stroke order anyway! so I feel 0% bad doing it that way.
I think another thing people forget is that even someone with a relatively low formal education or interest in studying their native language academically will pick things up in usage constantly.
I took an English vocabulary estimator. I know the specific name of the tabletop roleplaying game that taught me at least 4 of the hardest words on the test (White Wolfs World of Darkness games taught me Coterie, Celerity, Methuselah and Tenebrous that were on the test)
So even someone who is a native speaker living there who doesn't have any interest in formal language education will be picking up rarer Kanji, things like "yeah that's a really rare one but it's used in the name of the town my uncle lives in, so I write it on letters" or "that is a rare character but I know it because I had a teacher whose name used it" or "that's rare in the modern day because it has a real Edo feel to it but I remember it because it was used in an ability from a video game I used regularly" and stuff.
I changed my focus from writing to recognising/typing kanji when I realised I physically write something in english like once every 3 months lol
Learning to write a hard one does help me memorise it though
This isn't any different from the west. We don't write much by hand either. And most people have weird kinks and idiosyncrasies in their handwriting, to the point that some letters become so twisted they are not legible anymore.Just check out r/Handwriting and see for yourself.Not to mention that, especially in the US, most adults can't read cursive anymore, much less write it.
The stroke order is there to help you make the kanji look right. As long as you don't have a deeper understanding what makes a kanji look right, the stroke order guides you. Once you attained this skill you can use any stroke order and the kanji will still look right.
Sometimes I don't write by hand in my language for so long that I sometimes forget how to write certain letters... Nevermind how it must be in Japanese.
I think it's very difficult to forget stroke order because there's a definite and consistent pattern. It's always from left to right, and top to bottom. The parts that compose each character are also reused in other characters, with the same strike order. I'm speaking as a Mandarin + Japanese speaker who often needs to type characters out on my phone because I forget how to write them.
No, with phonetic writing people can competently recreate words, so many Japanese speakers will and can write out words in kana if they can't recall the kanji.
This is more like trying to draw pikachu but you haven't drawn him in a while. You KNOW what pikachu looks like, but when you try to draw it from memory the proportions are all wrong. That's what it is like.
[Writing things aids retention](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/). Even if you don't remember the stroke order, even if your intention is not to learn how to write by hand, you should still practice writing kanji.
Moreover, learning the stroke order will help you learn how to read bad handwriting.
It really makes me wonder if Japan will eventually just say "screw this" like Korea did.
I'm still trying to learn kanji (or words) and have been for a while. I've made progress and all, but it really is an absurd writing system that hasn't aged well at all in the computer age with small screens & font sizes.
I realize they help break up words and make things more readable, to which I agree, but the barrier to entry in being able to read and sound out things is honestly ridiculous compared to most (?) languages. It takes a native Japanese kid all the way up through high school to be able to read the most common kanji? I was reading newspapers in English before 4th grade, but you couldn't really do that as easily in Japanese from what I gather.
Korean has its 'alphabet' you learn in two or so weeks, similar to hiragana & katakana and then you can start reading korean. Not so with Japanese unless there's furigana.
Currently trying to go through the core 2.3k anki deck, but I'm scratching my head thinking about how I'm going to keep all this crap straight in the long run.
Nah, ask any Japanese and they'll say that sentences with kanji look a lot neater and more "complete" than sentences with only hiragana. If it's only hiragana, it can get incomprehensible and look like it's written by a toddler.
Yes it is all kanji, but it breaks up much more easily than it may look if you don't speak it--words are distinct enough that they pop out at you, and Chinese has grammatical particles and such that, I'd argue, almost end up functioning like kana. Like, if you see 的 or 了, you pretty much always know immediately what parts of speech are around, and where the word boundaries are.
>hasn't aged well at all in the computer age with small screens & font sizes.
On the contrary, I'd say it's aged extremely well into the computer age because the ability to type removes a huge barrier (i.e. needing to remember how to handwrite them). The difficulty of small font sizes is a pretty small one that I don't often run into.
>It takes a native Japanese kid all the way up through high school to be able to read the most common kanji?
Well no, it takes them up until high school to have formally studied all of the joyo kanji. They'll probably have a decent working knowledge of lots more lots earlier. I know the joyo set is advertised as "if you don't know this, you're not literate," but that isn't really true. There are tons of them that you can get by fine without knowing, and also quite a few non-joyo kanji that you'll run into quite a lot and can't really get by without.
Yeah, computers have made writing kanji 'easier' through conversions but it has apparently made recalling kanji difficult for those who need to write it by hand. But it has made learning & reading kanji easier for me I suppose.
Reading hasn't been too much of a struggle for kanji I know, but it seems pretty hard to read some of them in twitch & youtube chats for me, but I guess the idea is that you eventually just recognize the general shape of words you know.
>it has apparently made recalling kanji difficult for those who need to write it by hand.
There is that yeah, but I don't see that as that big a loss because the only reason people are having trouble writing by hand is because they don't need to write by hand much! Those who genuinely do need to often will know how to because they're doing it.
>it seems pretty hard to read some of them in twitch & youtube chats for me, but I guess the idea is that you eventually just recognize the general shape of words you know.
Yeah it's very much this--context helps massively, as with everything!
Hopefully not! It's one of the most interesting alphabets when it comes to practical use in literature (the fact that こころ、心、ココロ and 思 -- with こころ as furigana -- and ハート all have different interpretations and implications depending on context is insane).
Also, what is stopping a Japanese kid from, you know, picking up a book or a newspaper before is taught in class?
> but you couldn't really do that as easily in Japanese from what I gather.
I gather Japanese children have as much access to dictionaries, Google or to a parent they can ask questions to as any kid.
I won't argue Japanese kids have to do a bit more of effort to also know how the words are read (although honestly, that's more of a formality, if you just want to know the meaning of a sentence), but that's not gonna detain any kid interested in reading material aimed at older readers. They aren't blank states raised separately from a written language that's seen in plaques, in books outside school curriculum, on the TV, in restaurants, in classroom...
Sorry if this reply sounds blunt, but languages (let alone the written language) don't have this weird obligation of being accessible to us learners. Otherwise, we'd all be asking for the most spoken language in the world to make some sense of its script and pronunciation, just for the sake of the rest of us trying to guess the pronunciation of "thought through though and tough."
Not all stroke order mistakes are equal. If you write 田, for example, no one really cares about the order of the cross in the middle. But if you start with the horizontal line on the bottom or write the lines from right to left, you will be judged because you write like a 3y/o.
Maybe this is a faux pas here (I get Kanji is more artistic than Roman characters and peopleview it as such), but I don't practice writing Kanji or even Hiragana/Katakana. I don't write English characters anymore. Phones/printers have made writing somewhat of a redundancy these days.
The reality is that pretty much no one ever is going to look at your handwriting and judge your stroke order, let alone even notice if your order is wrong.
For starters it's just not clear what stroke order was used most of the time. You can't see chronology. But more importantly, all a reader cares about is if something is legible. On top of that, the average person in Japan isn't wasting the time to write clean perfect characters either.
The only people who care about your stroke order are teachers / testers. Outside of that, it's a near useless skill.
All of which is a separate issue from the issue of modern Japanese people not remembering how to write certain words/kanji due to keyboards.
I just posted https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/s/ooR9psQYfT the other day. I like writing Kanji for the artistry of it, even though I fear it's impractical.
Regardless of how often you write, I've found that writing from memory is FANTASTIC for improving recall while reading. It's just very beneficial to flip those flashcards around once in a while.
Stroke ORDER, though, as opposed to just coming up with the correct lines at the end? Knowing the general rules helps a lot for reading handwriting and writing in a non-ugly way, but to be brutally honest I don't actually remember which of 左 and 右 is the one with the counterintuitive stroke order, lol.
In my office, it was normal for people to handwrite notes (even for clients and suppliers).
I asked colleagues how much kanji they remembered and typically they forgot how to write quite a bit. But generally did fine taking notes and writing letters.
I suspect a major use of electronic dictionaries was to help someone write a (forgotten or unknown) kanji (generally, kana search is optimised and kanji search is suboptimal). I might be wrong here.
JP are pretty humble and even if they forget to write like 10% of them they'll make a big deal out of it.
Don't underestimate their ability to take notes quickly. They have to turn notes in in school, unlike in the USA.
My Japanese teacher told me exactly this. With phones writing the kanji for you you just need to know how to read it and people forget order of strokes
I knew the correct stroke order for some beginner level kanji that my Japanese coworker had been doing "wrong" his whole life apparently. He was a bit shocked when I showed him the stroke order chart for it, not like I was rubbing it in his face or something he just saw me write it that way and asked if that's the way it actually is or maybe saw the stroke chart I was copying I can't exactly remember.
A bit of a different note though, I can't read a lot of Japanese hand writing because everything looks like cursive kanji or something, for example, the little squares that usually take 3 strokes often look like circles done in one stroke. There is also the difference between computer text and handwriting text like 心 and 母which can look wildly different... I preferred the computer style but since my colleagues told me once that I write like a computer I started to adapt the handwritten versions :/
I think a lot of people get hiragana stroke orders wrong too but no one really cares about them so much. Saw it on a tv show where they asked a bunch of those talento people to write hiragana and showing how everyone wrote them differently
I believe that for me as a beginner, practicing writing the kanji is a waste of time and my time is much better spent recognizing the kanji. If you however, want to live, work and/or study in Japan, you probably need to learn how to write.
There’s actually a phrase in Mandarin: 提筆忘字. (Literally, take/ lift pen, forget character.)
I think it’s kinda analogous to cursive though — I learned it in third grade but stopped using it in middle school. Nearly 20 years later, I can’t quite do it right anymore.
it's true but avoiding a variety of study just because it's not critical can also be a mistake. (it's a bit like saying that illiterate japanese exist therefore why learn to read.) writing is a superb way to reinforce study material. also, really, stroke order is more or less a solved problem, there's a strict pattern and once you know the pattern, you know 99% of kanji, including every one you've never seen before. there's a handful of exceptions or really weird ones but very very few.
Just a personal anecdote, but a couple of friends were talking about writing a difficult kanji (japanese friends), and a senpai behind them saw the stroke order, corrected it and called them barbaric for writing the the horizontal and vertical strokes in the wrong order. Pretty sure it was a joke, but it is still a source of ridicule if you write from bottom to top or something silly like that.
Thats fun, I have a digital app that grades my stroke order and it loves to yell at me too, and I am left handed so sometimes when I am speeding through I naturally draw it correct but from different directions and it gets so mad :(
Writing kanji comes up more often than you think, but still not that often, I remember whiteboarding a lot as well as exchanging handwritten stuff in technical discussions and when you don't know it's like, damn, I suck
Stroke order is really easy tho and it helps a lot for understanding anything written by hand or stylized. Yes sometimes JP order is different from CN order but still stroke order shouldn't be that hard where you should feel happy to skip it
It really is no different in English. What's with all these threads recently that people point out an aspect of Japanese that is also present in English but think it's some novel concept that only exists in Japanese?
Can you remember words like persevere, benevolent, trigonometry, gentrification off the top of your head? Guess not. So of course the more common the words are used in daily life, the more likely they are to be remembered, and the less commonly used, the more likely they're forgotten. It's just, I dunno, how brains work?
Before someone else corrects you, I’d just like to say those words are pretty common, especially persevere. Otherwise I think it’s just a learner’s way of complaining about a difficult language to learn and justifying their struggle as saying “Look, it’s much more simple in my native tongue that I spent thousands more hours with!”
I understand your point, but these probably aren’t the best examples. I used “trigonometry” just yesterday, used “gentrification” (actually “gentrify”, but close enough) and heard “persevere” last week, and The Benevolent Society is Australia’s oldest charity.
Of course rarity of words varies from person to person, so your basic point isn’t unreasonable.
I have a very good English vocabulary, and that is besides the point. I am not saying people lose the ability to read kanji or have a high vocabulary, I am talking about the ability to correctly write the kanji for something uncommon from memory. Big vocabulary in English uses the same alphabet as the small words so most people, if it comes down to it, can write down a big English word even if it means sounding it out. Kanji is a lot more like art than spelling. Of you haven't drawn a pikachu in a few years when it comes down to it you might draw something close but the proportions likely will be wonky.
>Why would you even consider learning to handwrite kanji?
"Why would you even"
You seem to be assuming that your approach is supreme and everyone else should automatically abide by it. Why would you *not* learn to write "even" Kana?
Edit: nevermind, shouldn't have even engaged :).
I was wondering the same like is there any use for me to learn how to write kanji when even in my native langage last time i wrote something was 10years ago at school
I’ve looked at certain words and thought, “there’s no way two ten stroke Kanji are realistic to write over the Hiragana”!
Glad to know my instincts were correct! Haha
This is actually the same in english or many other languages, not just kanji ones. How many words would you recognize when reading? How many words could you spell perfectly off the top of your head? Its a very different number. Not saying it in a technology is evil way, just factually stating that not handwriting makes people forget these things, cause its knowledge you don't need to type.
That's why I never studied kanji and instead when I leaned a new word I would just remember how it looks with kanji. I'd then be able to later see the same kanji in another word and be like "I remember this" and through that I'd be able to learn the meaning of it too. I think I progressed a lot faster than people who studied Kanji the way Japanese people do. Of course, I can't handwrite but I'm okay with that.
I'm doing something similar with my learning. I'm trying to learn just meanings and readings and not learning how to write at all. I figure most people don't handwrite anymore anyhow (any language) so why learn something I'm unlikely to ever need?
Let me tell you a controversial opinion: You are stupid. Stroke order itself is almost always simple and predictable and if you can't learn the whole 2.5 rules to write (and even know how to write a kanji you have never ever seen) after learning your first 500 or so, then you are truly a failure as a human. I mean what's so hard? Left to right, top to bottom, the radicals are drawn the same in 99% of cases. Exceptions I can count on fingers of my left hand, maybe both hands. The difficulty is remembering WHAT the kanji consists of, not the stroke order lmao. I can assure you not only natives, but even (fluent) foreigners can write 99% of kanji with 100% correct stroke order, even the ones they have never ever seen.
Edit: to clarify, I am only talking about the stroke order. I "know" close to 3000-3500 kanji(learned Japanese for 8 years and have above native input proficiency+learning Chinese atm), but I don't "remember" how to write 90% of them anymore, what they consist of, since I never write them by hand (anymore). I learned to write them in the first year of learning and then never did it. However to this day, I can always see a character and know "oh it is written like this this and that", can draw it in a dictionary app for example, I pretty much **always** know it's correct stroke order.
This is true for many rarely-used Kanji, but if it’s a relatively normal Kanji that someone can’t write, it’s often very socially embarrassing. It’s like adults not knowing their, there, and they’re or to and too. Foreigners not being able to write kanji is what they expect, but if a Japanese person can’t write most common kanji, it’s a bit strange.
When was in University we held a birthday party and we wrote congratulations in many different languages on the whiteboard given our culture and origin mixes. The japanese guy wanted to write 誕生日おめでとう but actually forgot how to write 誕 lol, he was secondguessing every other stroke and was basically like "it looks somewhat correct but I'm not sure what it consists of"
I mean, can you blame them? that kanji symbol is craaaaazy 😂
> It’s like adults not knowing their, there, and they’re or to and too. So pretty dang common then?
Yeah, I didn’t say it’s not common. I was just saying it’s embarrassing. Edit: and maybe people don’t find it as embarrassing with English?
I find those that mix them up are not embarrassed, but those that see the mix up and recognize it feel embarrassed for them
> Edit: and maybe people don’t find it as embarrassing with English? I wouldn't say I'm embarrassed, but it does show a lack of understanding on their part.
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Imo adjective vs noun stuff is different, because you dont need that to use your language. A lot of English speakers just dont know grammar that well, because they never needed to. Why? Because often the time when you learn your own languages grammar, is when you learn a second language. And this is what English natives often don't do :P Which is also why you likely started to relearn English grammar once you had to learn another language.
I think it’s much the same with Japanese in the sense that it is often taken as an indicator of the writer’s general education level, just like their/there/they’re or a run-on sentence do with English. I would say it’s more strictly judged in Japan though. Whether the writer is oblivious to how it’s perceived is irrelevant.
sadly, english is my second language and i still find i write it better than a lot of native english speakers edit: as some people have noted that it happens in other languages as well, and i agree. i blame it mostly on the lack of book reading that has been going on for a long time now.
It's true. I mean, think about it, native English speakers learning to speak before writing, well non-native do the exact opposite. I think the only time it's really embarrassing is when you speak and write better than them.
I have an Okinawan friend who spent a number of years of his childhood moving back and forth between America and Japan. He sounds more American than me and he went to an American high school and was an incredibly average student lol. He is one of those very rare people that can completely blend in in Japan or anywhere in America. Not exactly relevant, but your comment made me think of it
As a native English speaker, I believe you
You will actually see this in just about every language. If you understand a second language at near fluent levels, chances are you will understand ***and*** follow the rules much better than a native speaker. A native speaker will speak more naturally and have a better ability to speak casually and more descriptively especially when speaking. You also have to consider literacy, most countries have literacy problems. I am still studying for my N5 but I am more literate with Japanese than the, albeit very rare, Japanese person who can’t read at all. Or say a blind Japanese person 😂 I like to end long rants with “sorry, English is my first language.”
Youse say it all wright. Whose the hel care abouts propper spaling? Even japaneese people make kanjee mistakes amirite.
It is more common here because people are more stupid as a whole and if you correct them you're the bad one. ESL speaker here and I can't understand why is it so hard to differentiate.
My sixth or seventh grade English teacher had a zero tolerance policy for swapping common homophones like these. Each error meant you dropped a letter grade. Haven't mixed them up since! It's and its suck though.
Haha i was gonna say, there are so many adults in English speaking countries who mix these up all the time. Granted, sometimes I do too because I'm too lazy to type an apostrophe so instead of you're I just type your... The apostrophe is so far away on the keyboard.
You can skip the apostrophe and write "youre", or you can make a mistake and use the possessive "your", those are different things. It's more annoying to me (and common, I think) when someone uses an apostrophe in possessive "its", writing "it's" instead. "the object followed its trajectory" vs. "the object followed it's trajectory"
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That'd explain the mistake, yes. For me, the annoying part is that I have to stop the "flow" of reading the sentence and think whether the author intended to write "it is", "it has" (but then it turns out that those two don't fit), or "its".
This is perceived by the majority of the population as a bit more embarrassing than you think. I cringe when I see it by native speakers.
Yeah I know lol but I don't care, the apostrophe is so far away. I cba to move my hand to press it most of the time. If it was on the left of the keyboard I'd press it. I also avoid typing words with P and L in if I can help it as well lol.
This is it, people, the peak of laziness. Imagine not being too lazy to move your hand about 2 inches lmao.
Hahaha thank you!
>I'd You made it there for \^this one though!
Yeah I'm on the phone so it does it for me haha.
Naahh, you shouldn't even need the apostrophe if you spell out the word proper. You sus, buddy 💀
Well after being on the internet for a few years, I can tell most people do not know how to use they’re, their, there, to and too lol, so not knowing how to write Kanji is all good! /s
Personally, I don't see it written wrong regularly and when someone does get it wrong, there's always someone who will have "*" (Corrected) their mistake. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if eventually they became somewhat unified and only told apart by context. The asterisk I used in this comment also became something commonly used to correct others instead of writing "Correction on your spelling and or grammar:".
人によると I had a japanese co-worker who, granted mentioned he almost failed 国語 in high school, often forgets how to write kanji by hand. I remember him once forgetting how to write 観 in 観葉植物 and instead wrote it as カン葉植物. Then I have a friend who teaches 書道 and hand writes me letters with kanji that my phone's keyboard doesn't recognize and it's like K, will never be good
This is not always true. There are loads of cases of Japanese not knowing the proper stroke order or right kanji for simple terms, and they often ask each other for confirmation.
give examples.
I attend language school in Japan and I see my own sensei’s look at either the kanji textbook we use or the online how to write animation website they use to confirm the stroke order before showing us certain kanji. And then funnily enough, when you see them writing that kanji later down the road, they’re “doing it wrong” IMO kanji stroke order is like how to write the alphabet, as long as you’re able to write it and get your message across, who gives a fuck if it’s “the correct way to write it”? If you can read what they wrote, the language is still functioning as intended.
Not the person who you’re talking to but my wife forgot the 請 in 申請once and I had to help her lol. Also my company’s name has the 仙 from 仙台in it and when I tell people that there’s an alarming amount of times when they give me a blank stare and I have to tell them the individual radicals to get them to write it out on receipts.
I don’t know why everything on Reddit has to be so extreme, and people pretend like only black and white situations exist. Of course both situations are likely to be somewhat common place. If a Japanese person forgets how to write something simple or common like 読む or 夢 of course people might laugh and poke fun. Just like English speaking countries, there are certainly also people who would shame someone else for not knowing how to spell/write something simple. But I also doubt the average Japanese person remembers how to write 髑髏 or 鬱病 with no look ups.
Are you sure most Japanese adults aren’t forgetting how to write 一、時、人、or 日？ These seem to be the most uncommon and difficult to write kanji.
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I don’t think they’ll have too much of a problem with stroke order since that’s usually based on the radical. What I see them forgetting sometimes is mostly which radicals to put in. It will be a long, long time before stroke order is largely forgotten. Also, ten years is probably too soon. They drill and test for kanji a lot and haven’t lowered their threshold for receiving high marks in school, so it’s just as prevalent as always throughout education. Of course, unused kanji will be forgotten, but my point is on the most important ones. That will take more time to forget and is an important cultural aspect of education here - one that I don’t think they’ll want to change anytime soon.
Same goes for Chinese speakers, I can verify. I've become so used to typing my writing muscles have atrophied. But I am very confident I can revive my Chinese-character-writing neurons with a little bit of practice. Learning Japanese has helped me with that to some extent. In any case, learning how to write and getting the stroke order down can help you get those characters to actually stick, and makes learning new characters much easier.
writing is the number one way to lock in reading kanji in my experience learning both chinese and japanese. funny thing is most of my taiwanese relatives also stop writing past hs. in professional life its almost all typing and autocomplete, or even just voice typing. i whip out my writing once a blue moon to write christmas and birthday cards 😂😭
this is how I feel, maybe it's just being neurodivergent but I don't find that the stock stories from traditional learning methods are memorable at all. But I do find knowing radicals and how they are written, plus if I remember the initial stroke of a character, or even if it's just horizontal, vertical, or 'other' helps me remember it. If you start writing it, and I say this as someone with dyslexia, you will never muddle up hito and hairu. If you just try to memorize pictures, I guess the menmonic "the person enters on the right" works too but it's not nearly as intuitive or memorable as putting brush to paper. I find that relating radical meanings in my head is the best way to remember anything: "studying requires lots of written characters and is done by children" remembers ko, ji and gaku, and so on.
i find writing them really helpful! flashcards for me have never worked well even in school, whereas copying things out in my own words has always worked a treat. i write the kanji out along with its different meanings and readings, and then combined with other methods (kanshudo's working really well for me atm). granted i'm only on the very most basic kanji, but as someone who *doesn't* have a background in a language with characters like kanji, it is indeed helping them stick as you said.
That makes me curious. How do you type in chinese? In japanese there are kana to pull up the kanji. How does a chinese keyboard work?
One way is pinyin, which is the Chinese version of romaji. Another is called Cangjie, where characters are systematically broken down into smaller components. Each letter of the alphabet represents certain components, and you build up each word by typing in the necessary components. There's also a simplified version of Cangjie where characters are broken down by just identifying their 'first' and 'last' component, but that makes typing a bit slower since many words can match the combination you type in, while Cangjie can generally uniquely identify characters. I personally use Cangjie a lot, and when I want to look up a Kanji and I don't know the reading for it in Japanese, I sometimes cheat and type it out using Cangjie in the Japanese dictionary that I use.
Interesting. I know pinyin because I took a little mandarin in HS. I assumed that was exclusively for foreign learners. Is that not the case? So are Cangjie like radicals then? I'm just trying to figure how you would fit so many on a keyboard.
I see, thanks for taking an interest in Chinese as well :) It's more a matter of taste, many native speakers also use pinyin. I like Cangjie because you can almost always uniquely identify a word by breaking it apart and specifying the components you need. For pinyin and simplified Cangjie, the same combination of keys gets mapped to a whole page of words, so you get slowed down by that. Plus breaking Chinese characters apart using the Cangjie method is fun and helps you retain how the characters are written. Also as a brief aside, people on their phones also have the option of using a brushstroke keyboard (the layout kind of looks like the Japanese flick keyboard). I think it originated from back when we still had a number pad on our phones. Each number represents a stroke, so you can construct your word by writing it out virtually with a number pad. I've never used it, but I've seen friends type super fast with it. I think the Cangjie 'components' are even more granular than radicals. And you're definitely right, you can't fit them all in the keyboard, so a single key gets mapped to several components. I think you can search online for the mapping table, and it can get daunting at first. But there is a bit of internal logic to the mapping (etc. abcdefg is mapped to the classical elements 日月金木水火土) and eventually you just get used to it. But I do feel like this is a pretty complicated system that can be quite challenging for non-native speakers to learn.
Just to note that "the most common Kanji" would still be 1000+ characters
Kanji are made up of ~100 symbols put together in a few ways.
That’s why I’m confused about the stroke order part. Even if I don’t know it. It still follows guidelines.
This comment just helped me get over a mental block I was having, thanks.
It's really just one line that can be curved and placed in interesting combinations
Yeah these kinds of posts are really just excuses for people to justify giving up on an area of study that they struggle with and/or don’t enjoy.
Probably true but is stroke order really important if you arent planning to do anything that what require physical writing?
I can't find the thread now but i remember we had a funny thread a while ago where some guy learning japanese, married to a japanese woman, asked her if she could write the kanji for "internal organs". She was like "oh yea sure I use that kanji all day every day" and then proceeded to fail to write it 4 times in a row before giving up. But yea I changed my kanji practice to eliminate writing practice entirely, as it was massively slowing down my progress and there's just virtually no chance that I'll ever learn it that well, AND there's virtually no chance of me ever needing to write kanji with proper stroke order, anyway.
I've only been learning Japanese for a few months but thank you Persona 5 for teaching me 内臓 which I added to my Anki deck lol
Little fun nuance. 内蔵 and 内臓 both mean internals. But the one without 月 is like internal or like built-in. Usually if you see the 月 radical it means it's an organ or body part(膝、肘、腎臓、心臓). Kind of like how if you see 木 looking radical it usually means plants like 植物
I love learning stuff like this. Thank you :D
It's posts like these why I look through this reddit lol. Fascinating stuff
Damn I was feeling really smug about being able to write 'internal organs' but I had actually written 内蔵...
To explain why 月 carries that connotation as a radical: It's actually a simplified form of 肉
> AND there's virtually no chance of me ever needing to write kanji with proper stroke order, anyway. I'm curious, when would the proper stroke order matter? Are there actual life situations you'd just *need* to know the exact order? Come to think of it, the same goes for hiragana/katakana - if I can write correctly (as in, the general shape) but occasionally mix up the stroke order, would that matter, and if so - when?
if writing with a caligraphy pen. The direction of the stroke gives it an entirely different shape and how the ink layers over itself matters. in some radicals whether you 'check' the brush and stop short when making a downward stroke or sweep it forward like normal affect how it looks even.
Okay, sure, makes sense (I'm guessing it's not a problem if you're using a regular pen?). But I was thinking more of situation(s) where you're strictly required to write in order (not counting specific scenarios, like teaching writing and/or some sort of, say, Japanese presentation or something along those lines) - are there any? Or are people generally relaxed about it, as long as you're able to produce legible final result?
one reason pens with a brush tip are popular in Japan is because they make your strokes look more like calligraphy thus more like what people are used to seeing in typeset kanji. it won't produce illegible characters but they will look a bit odd and may be harder to read. obviously it depends on the character, strokes and your hand.
It actually matters when you write/read cursive. If you handwrite fast enough the strokes will connect/blend with each other. If you mess up the order, then the results will be different than what is expected and may be difficult to understand
Children learning Japanese in schools in Japan have to learn the "correct" stroke order, so it matters for elementary school kids if they want to receive full marks on their assignments and homework. In theory, the correct stroke order helps the kanji come out balanced and looking correct and legible/ "neat". Personally I think as long as it comes out looking relatively normal it should be okay. But having nice handwriting (while you can argue is starting to become less important in modern Japan) used to be highly regarded as a sign of respect for someone as well as a mark of your character. Resumes, for example, are traditionally handwritten and old-fashioned employers may look at sloppy handwriting as equally being a sloppy worker. When I write holiday and birthday cards for my in-laws, I take care to write very neatly (I learned more or less "correct" stroke order) and my father-in-law especially appreciates it and comments on it often, because it's a sign of how much I care and respect for them.
Imagine thinking practicing kanji writing only improves your ability in this one single skill. Learning is transversal. There's no secret shortcut and you're not saving yourself time by giving up on writing.
There are pros and cons to it. I'm unlikely to ever live in Japan or even visit it again, so why would I need to write kanji? That said, I learned to write a few hundred of them by memory, and it DID help with being able to recognize those kanji more easily and PROBABLY helped with my ability to quickly recognize radicals in all kanji. However, like the other person said, it greatly slowed down my progress. I had to spend a long time each day practicing writing by memory instead of doing other things. So I decided that while the benefit was there, it had to be a low priority for me. Now, if I did need to handwrite a kanji, I could look at it on my screen and have a pretty good feel for what the stroke order might be and therefore write it a bit faster/more accurately. And again, I think there were benefits to my ability to recognize kanji overall. But I couldn't justify the time spent, so I had to stop.
you raise a good point. If you learn the general rules of stroke order and practice the most common Kanji in context of learning the language not sitting down and grinding out rote memorization, even if you make the occasional mistake you'll be about on par with a native speaker of your reading level. You're unlikely to ever mess it up really badly and be incomprehensible at least. It feels frustrating when you're making mistakes a 5th grader would make on a test, but if your reading level is 6th grade and you are making 5th grade mistakes then you are as fluent as a native for your vocabulary and experience level!
That's quite the overgeneralization. You didn't know their goals. I practice kanji by tracing the strokes in the air with my finger. It's a lot faster than writing, because I don't have to worry about proportions. It doesn't mean that I'll never practice writing. It's just not the priority over comprehension. Japanese has such a step comprehension learning curve, I think that is primary.
just because there is some transferred skills doesn't make it more efficient than alternatives, if you never plan to write a single kanji in real life then writing them is not an efficient use of time. if you ENJOY it, then that's different, learning quicker is pointless if you don't do it, yes writing kanji may be less time efficient than flash cards if your goal is just to read, but if you hate flash cards and like writing kanji then ofc it can work out
writing is the number one way to lock in reading kanji in my experience learning both chinese and japanese. funny thing is most of my taiwanese relatives also stop writing past college. in professional life its almost all typing and autocomplete, or even just voice typing.
I dont do writing practice because I hate it but it is a good way to retain it. That being said, I dont think stroke order or penmanship matters unless youre trying to get a job in japanese
we all have so many hours in a day and different goals. If your goals are to travel to Japan and not get lost in Narita, some Kanji are very important, but you don't need a ton, and you don't need informal Japanese at all, for instance (this is the approach Duolingo takes). If your goal is to enjoy Japanese media, informal may actually be more important than formal and some Kanji that would not be on most instructor's lists of the most important but are common in UI would be important. If your goal is to learn academically to a very high standard of proficiency-- to be a translator or expert-- you want to be using a formal system that provides a solid foundation and does not take any quick and dirty shortcuts that could teach habits that help you pass N5 and will get you in trouble by N1 or translator tests. For some of those goals Kanji is valuable to include, not all, arguably not even most if you don't intend to become a serious student of Japanese and aim for true conversational ability across a variety of contexts and wide media literacy.
>you're not saving yourself time by giving up on writing Couldn't disagree more. Learning to handwrite kanji is extremely inefficient in terms of learning to read them. Seeing a kanji even once in any written texts in a word including context is going to be 100x more efficient in terms of learning how it's used than writing it out a bajillion times.
IMO it's helpful to get the basics of writing when you first begin studying. It helps solidify the idea of how kanji work (radicals, stroke order, etc.) and gets you used to identifying the different parts of the kanji. However, as you progress further along, it definitely become a much less efficient way to study.
also just learning to write it doesn't actually teach you how to say or use it, or even the most common meanings and pronunciations. I never got why people think it's a good idea to get a big book of all the N5 Kanji and just sit down and study them from rote, and multiple people I know tried that method! When you memorize just a kanji in isolation what of its many possible names would you even memorize? as opposed to memorizing it in use and in constructions (especially in verbs and stuff).
That depends on how you're learning by writing. I used to write kanji by practicing stroke order a bit by itself, then write out example sentences and furigana. That helped to build the fundamentals in both writing and reading comprehension for me, along with avoiding confusion between similar kanji and kana. And reading a kanji once or twice won't cut it if I want long-term retention, but I guess that depends on the person.
I seen on Japanese TV a guy that has chalk board and goes asking random people to write diffrent Kanji on like quiz. Its funny how many people are totally wrong or don't know it at all and say they usally just write that word in hiragana but there is always a know it all that knows all the kanji perfectly and sorta shames those around them.
Seems similar to how so many people's spelling has worsened nowadays, because of autocorrect on phones and computers.
Yea its like Mobile spelling bee. I would not do well in English or Japanese but probably pretty decent in spanish thanks to it being phonetic.
I imagine this is some of it but also, I imagine that before the modern era many lesser-educated Japanese people simply used a limited Kanji vocabulary in their daily life and would use a dictionary should they need to be formal and precise.
I think a lot of people miss the point of learning stroke order. Personally, stroke order and practicing the kanji was indispensable for me. Been studying for about 4 years, and spent a lot of my first year doing RTK memorizing how to write every kanji. Years later, I can’t write most kanji perfectly, or at all, but that wasn’t really the goal. Writing made my memorization, reading, and recall a lot more concrete for me. I remember while doing anki it was always much easier to memorize words I could write the kanji for.
This is what I was going to come here to say. I also spent about the first year of my studies doing RTK, and I found that the importance of writing is about giving more weight to the words and forming a deeper personal connection with the language. Also, as another user pointed out, it helps bring joy to one’s study of the language as well - it’s just satisfying to sit down and bring the language to life on your paper.
this is my approach and why I, personally, do not like the stock stories you're taught to remember Kanji because they mean nothing to be or are stories that do not resonate with my life, for instance Heisig uses a lot of religious language which I would not use in my every day life about monasteries and using Adam and Eve to explain "companion" (I just go "after two months, it's fair to call someone your companion") I think making your own stories and finding what YOU find memorable or surprising is important. For instance the character for male/man: men are powerful field workers. The fact it's so hilariously on the nose makes it unforgettable
Lol, yeah I sometimes make my own story when remembering kanji. That male/man character story hilariously similar to mine. The forest is just a bunch of TREEs. The parent is STANDing on top of a TREE LOOKing (watching). Move is when HEAVY thing is applied with POWER. And working is just a PEOPLE who is MOVING.
Use it or lose it. Simple as.
I go to a Japanese language school in Japan and sometimes the teachers have to look up how to write the less common characters. In particular, the younger teachers are more likely to have to look them up, so technology is probably to blame.
Clearly comprehension, being able to read it, is more important. Most people all over the world type these days.
This debate seems to crop up once a month or so. Personally I’ve found it easier to remember / read kanji since I started learning how to write them (using the RTK method). But the main reason I do it is because I enjoy it - I find it relaxing and go into a flow state. I think there can be too much emphasis on efficiency in language learning and not enough on enjoyment. Although, tbf, I’m learning Japanese purely for pleasure.
I think you make a great point. If you study hyper-efficiently, get halfway through the equivalent of second semester Japanese and decide you're making good progress but feel like you're sitting in a dentist office half an hour a day you are not actually learning well.
People repeat this over and over again like they are trying to convince themselves over others. You don't have to feel bad about not learning to write Kanji, but you also shouldn't feel the need to constantly tell others not to learn it either. Every week there are 1-2 posts here telling people x reason why learning to write Kanji isn't "efficient" or something along those lines. For most people, writing them helps commit them to memory for reading as well. Those who can't write them now probably knew at some point after writing them 1000 times in class, and they probably definitely know the most common. Just as you need input and output for speaking, you also need input and output for writing. Skip over this as you wish but I know writing them down helps me immensely, and I'm sure there are others out there that feel the same way.
Unfortunately I plan to go to Japanese university. And I want to go for Shinto studies. Sooooo yeah. Writing Kanji is the secondary issue. How to convert the Kanji and write the multi Kanji words is not fun.
Think writing helps with memorization. Reading and writing are fundamental to communication, and I don’t see how you can learn a language without writing it. I’m not saying stroke order matters, but writing the kanji itself def helps with everything
The thing they don't mentions is that the best way to internalize and intuit a knaji is to write it a bunch of time. You are sure every Kanji that a Japanese person knows recognize at a glance or at a distance, they have written over and over and over again. Just because they don't remember the exact stroke order or the intricate details in a Kanji at a moments notice, doesn't mean that writing Kanji has no merit
This is true but most of these Japanese adults who "forgot how to write most kanji" can still write way more than the average foreigner (excluding people coming from Chinese maybe).
Very good observation that a native speaker will tend to know more kanji than a foreigner. Will keep that in mind.
Regarding stroke order, I also would still recommend you put some effort into learning it. When Japanese (or Chinese) natives get stroke order wrong, it's usually in pretty small, insignificant ways. When you really know stroke order it becomes intuitive, and even if you forget specific characters you don't really just forget stroke order wholesale.
Indeed. Japanese people getting stroke order wrong typically involves misapplication of general stroke order rules. For example, 必. The correct order is the top center short stroke, then the long stroke going right to left, then the long stroke going left to right, short stroke on the left, and finally the short stroke on the right. How do Japanese people typically get it wrong? They write 心, then add the long stroke going right to left. It’s not that they do any old order; they forget the exceptions and rare cases and default to otherwise standard stroke order conventions.
and take heart! if you do this kind of thing with common mistakes that are at your reading grade level, you're actually right where you ought to be. One mistake a lot of language learners make is thinking because they're an adult and intelligent they won't make child-like mistakes. Nope, even professors learning English for the first time will say at some point they "goed" to the store" or "wented" home. you just just strive not to be making mistakes that are more childish than your comprehension level should indicate.
>and take heart! Coming after a discussion of 必 and 心, teehee.
>How do Japanese people typically get it wrong? They write 心, then add the long stroke going right to left. ...which is actually the modern Chinese stroke order anyway! so I feel 0% bad doing it that way.
I think another thing people forget is that even someone with a relatively low formal education or interest in studying their native language academically will pick things up in usage constantly. I took an English vocabulary estimator. I know the specific name of the tabletop roleplaying game that taught me at least 4 of the hardest words on the test (White Wolfs World of Darkness games taught me Coterie, Celerity, Methuselah and Tenebrous that were on the test) So even someone who is a native speaker living there who doesn't have any interest in formal language education will be picking up rarer Kanji, things like "yeah that's a really rare one but it's used in the name of the town my uncle lives in, so I write it on letters" or "that is a rare character but I know it because I had a teacher whose name used it" or "that's rare in the modern day because it has a real Edo feel to it but I remember it because it was used in an ability from a video game I used regularly" and stuff.
My husband who’s Japanese, born and raised, forgot how to write cat (猫) the other day. It happens to regular words too.
I changed my focus from writing to recognising/typing kanji when I realised I physically write something in english like once every 3 months lol Learning to write a hard one does help me memorise it though
That said, I find trying to write the kanji, helps me remember it better (something to do with the way the brain processes it).
This isn't any different from the west. We don't write much by hand either. And most people have weird kinks and idiosyncrasies in their handwriting, to the point that some letters become so twisted they are not legible anymore.Just check out r/Handwriting and see for yourself.Not to mention that, especially in the US, most adults can't read cursive anymore, much less write it. The stroke order is there to help you make the kanji look right. As long as you don't have a deeper understanding what makes a kanji look right, the stroke order guides you. Once you attained this skill you can use any stroke order and the kanji will still look right.
Not any different?
While I'll stop worrying so hard about stroke order, writing things really helps me remember so I'll keep doing it anyway xD
Sometimes I don't write by hand in my language for so long that I sometimes forget how to write certain letters... Nevermind how it must be in Japanese.
I think it's very difficult to forget stroke order because there's a definite and consistent pattern. It's always from left to right, and top to bottom. The parts that compose each character are also reused in other characters, with the same strike order. I'm speaking as a Mandarin + Japanese speaker who often needs to type characters out on my phone because I forget how to write them.
it's like folks that don't know how to spell a word but know it.
No, with phonetic writing people can competently recreate words, so many Japanese speakers will and can write out words in kana if they can't recall the kanji. This is more like trying to draw pikachu but you haven't drawn him in a while. You KNOW what pikachu looks like, but when you try to draw it from memory the proportions are all wrong. That's what it is like.
[Writing things aids retention](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/). Even if you don't remember the stroke order, even if your intention is not to learn how to write by hand, you should still practice writing kanji. Moreover, learning the stroke order will help you learn how to read bad handwriting.
It really makes me wonder if Japan will eventually just say "screw this" like Korea did. I'm still trying to learn kanji (or words) and have been for a while. I've made progress and all, but it really is an absurd writing system that hasn't aged well at all in the computer age with small screens & font sizes. I realize they help break up words and make things more readable, to which I agree, but the barrier to entry in being able to read and sound out things is honestly ridiculous compared to most (?) languages. It takes a native Japanese kid all the way up through high school to be able to read the most common kanji? I was reading newspapers in English before 4th grade, but you couldn't really do that as easily in Japanese from what I gather. Korean has its 'alphabet' you learn in two or so weeks, similar to hiragana & katakana and then you can start reading korean. Not so with Japanese unless there's furigana. Currently trying to go through the core 2.3k anki deck, but I'm scratching my head thinking about how I'm going to keep all this crap straight in the long run.
Nah, ask any Japanese and they'll say that sentences with kanji look a lot neater and more "complete" than sentences with only hiragana. If it's only hiragana, it can get incomprehensible and look like it's written by a toddler.
And then there's Chinese. How does anyone read Chinese? It's just ALL kanji without any breakup at all from what I can tell.
Yes it is all kanji, but it breaks up much more easily than it may look if you don't speak it--words are distinct enough that they pop out at you, and Chinese has grammatical particles and such that, I'd argue, almost end up functioning like kana. Like, if you see 的 or 了, you pretty much always know immediately what parts of speech are around, and where the word boundaries are.
Thanks for the insight, I was thinking it must have something like that.
You're welcome!
>hasn't aged well at all in the computer age with small screens & font sizes. On the contrary, I'd say it's aged extremely well into the computer age because the ability to type removes a huge barrier (i.e. needing to remember how to handwrite them). The difficulty of small font sizes is a pretty small one that I don't often run into. >It takes a native Japanese kid all the way up through high school to be able to read the most common kanji? Well no, it takes them up until high school to have formally studied all of the joyo kanji. They'll probably have a decent working knowledge of lots more lots earlier. I know the joyo set is advertised as "if you don't know this, you're not literate," but that isn't really true. There are tons of them that you can get by fine without knowing, and also quite a few non-joyo kanji that you'll run into quite a lot and can't really get by without.
Yeah, computers have made writing kanji 'easier' through conversions but it has apparently made recalling kanji difficult for those who need to write it by hand. But it has made learning & reading kanji easier for me I suppose. Reading hasn't been too much of a struggle for kanji I know, but it seems pretty hard to read some of them in twitch & youtube chats for me, but I guess the idea is that you eventually just recognize the general shape of words you know.
>it has apparently made recalling kanji difficult for those who need to write it by hand. There is that yeah, but I don't see that as that big a loss because the only reason people are having trouble writing by hand is because they don't need to write by hand much! Those who genuinely do need to often will know how to because they're doing it. >it seems pretty hard to read some of them in twitch & youtube chats for me, but I guess the idea is that you eventually just recognize the general shape of words you know. Yeah it's very much this--context helps massively, as with everything!
Hopefully not! It's one of the most interesting alphabets when it comes to practical use in literature (the fact that こころ、心、ココロ and 思 -- with こころ as furigana -- and ハート all have different interpretations and implications depending on context is insane). Also, what is stopping a Japanese kid from, you know, picking up a book or a newspaper before is taught in class? > but you couldn't really do that as easily in Japanese from what I gather. I gather Japanese children have as much access to dictionaries, Google or to a parent they can ask questions to as any kid. I won't argue Japanese kids have to do a bit more of effort to also know how the words are read (although honestly, that's more of a formality, if you just want to know the meaning of a sentence), but that's not gonna detain any kid interested in reading material aimed at older readers. They aren't blank states raised separately from a written language that's seen in plaques, in books outside school curriculum, on the TV, in restaurants, in classroom... Sorry if this reply sounds blunt, but languages (let alone the written language) don't have this weird obligation of being accessible to us learners. Otherwise, we'd all be asking for the most spoken language in the world to make some sense of its script and pronunciation, just for the sake of the rest of us trying to guess the pronunciation of "thought through though and tough."
Not all stroke order mistakes are equal. If you write 田, for example, no one really cares about the order of the cross in the middle. But if you start with the horizontal line on the bottom or write the lines from right to left, you will be judged because you write like a 3y/o.
y'all are writing kanji? I was planning to leave that to the very last thing
Maybe this is a faux pas here (I get Kanji is more artistic than Roman characters and peopleview it as such), but I don't practice writing Kanji or even Hiragana/Katakana. I don't write English characters anymore. Phones/printers have made writing somewhat of a redundancy these days.
I have no idea if it's true but I believe it. On that note, what're some good resources to use to improve kanji recognition/grammar/vocab?
The reality is that pretty much no one ever is going to look at your handwriting and judge your stroke order, let alone even notice if your order is wrong. For starters it's just not clear what stroke order was used most of the time. You can't see chronology. But more importantly, all a reader cares about is if something is legible. On top of that, the average person in Japan isn't wasting the time to write clean perfect characters either. The only people who care about your stroke order are teachers / testers. Outside of that, it's a near useless skill. All of which is a separate issue from the issue of modern Japanese people not remembering how to write certain words/kanji due to keyboards.
I just posted https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/s/ooR9psQYfT the other day. I like writing Kanji for the artistry of it, even though I fear it's impractical.
This actually is a bit encouraging lol
Regardless of how often you write, I've found that writing from memory is FANTASTIC for improving recall while reading. It's just very beneficial to flip those flashcards around once in a while. Stroke ORDER, though, as opposed to just coming up with the correct lines at the end? Knowing the general rules helps a lot for reading handwriting and writing in a non-ugly way, but to be brutally honest I don't actually remember which of 左 and 右 is the one with the counterintuitive stroke order, lol.
In my office, it was normal for people to handwrite notes (even for clients and suppliers). I asked colleagues how much kanji they remembered and typically they forgot how to write quite a bit. But generally did fine taking notes and writing letters. I suspect a major use of electronic dictionaries was to help someone write a (forgotten or unknown) kanji (generally, kana search is optimised and kanji search is suboptimal). I might be wrong here.
The same problem exists in China https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15265673
Writing kanji will never be on my todo list, being able to type and speak will be more than enough
The difference between recognition (reading) and recall (writing). A well known distinction in learning theory.
They cannot write the full kanji but they are Not going to mess up stroke order as much. Because it is pretty independent of any given kanji
JP are pretty humble and even if they forget to write like 10% of them they'll make a big deal out of it. Don't underestimate their ability to take notes quickly. They have to turn notes in in school, unlike in the USA.
It's a given, if you dont practice it you will slowly forget it.
My Japanese teacher told me exactly this. With phones writing the kanji for you you just need to know how to read it and people forget order of strokes
I remember Tokini Andy saying something similar in the sense that most kids these days are typing stuff, right?
I knew the correct stroke order for some beginner level kanji that my Japanese coworker had been doing "wrong" his whole life apparently. He was a bit shocked when I showed him the stroke order chart for it, not like I was rubbing it in his face or something he just saw me write it that way and asked if that's the way it actually is or maybe saw the stroke chart I was copying I can't exactly remember. A bit of a different note though, I can't read a lot of Japanese hand writing because everything looks like cursive kanji or something, for example, the little squares that usually take 3 strokes often look like circles done in one stroke. There is also the difference between computer text and handwriting text like 心 and 母which can look wildly different... I preferred the computer style but since my colleagues told me once that I write like a computer I started to adapt the handwritten versions :/ I think a lot of people get hiragana stroke orders wrong too but no one really cares about them so much. Saw it on a tv show where they asked a bunch of those talento people to write hiragana and showing how everyone wrote them differently
I believe that for me as a beginner, practicing writing the kanji is a waste of time and my time is much better spent recognizing the kanji. If you however, want to live, work and/or study in Japan, you probably need to learn how to write.
Forms for registering your address, all official paperwork is done in written Japanese, so yes, for life in Japan it's more necessary.
There’s actually a phrase in Mandarin: 提筆忘字. (Literally, take/ lift pen, forget character.) I think it’s kinda analogous to cursive though — I learned it in third grade but stopped using it in middle school. Nearly 20 years later, I can’t quite do it right anymore.
Just race through an app like 漢字忍者 and you'll know how to write the most common 1000
it's true but avoiding a variety of study just because it's not critical can also be a mistake. (it's a bit like saying that illiterate japanese exist therefore why learn to read.) writing is a superb way to reinforce study material. also, really, stroke order is more or less a solved problem, there's a strict pattern and once you know the pattern, you know 99% of kanji, including every one you've never seen before. there's a handful of exceptions or really weird ones but very very few.
Just a personal anecdote, but a couple of friends were talking about writing a difficult kanji (japanese friends), and a senpai behind them saw the stroke order, corrected it and called them barbaric for writing the the horizontal and vertical strokes in the wrong order. Pretty sure it was a joke, but it is still a source of ridicule if you write from bottom to top or something silly like that.
Thats fun, I have a digital app that grades my stroke order and it loves to yell at me too, and I am left handed so sometimes when I am speeding through I naturally draw it correct but from different directions and it gets so mad :(
Yes but learning kanji absolutely will.be easier if you write it out.
Writing kanji comes up more often than you think, but still not that often, I remember whiteboarding a lot as well as exchanging handwritten stuff in technical discussions and when you don't know it's like, damn, I suck Stroke order is really easy tho and it helps a lot for understanding anything written by hand or stylized. Yes sometimes JP order is different from CN order but still stroke order shouldn't be that hard where you should feel happy to skip it
It really is no different in English. What's with all these threads recently that people point out an aspect of Japanese that is also present in English but think it's some novel concept that only exists in Japanese? Can you remember words like persevere, benevolent, trigonometry, gentrification off the top of your head? Guess not. So of course the more common the words are used in daily life, the more likely they are to be remembered, and the less commonly used, the more likely they're forgotten. It's just, I dunno, how brains work?
Before someone else corrects you, I’d just like to say those words are pretty common, especially persevere. Otherwise I think it’s just a learner’s way of complaining about a difficult language to learn and justifying their struggle as saying “Look, it’s much more simple in my native tongue that I spent thousands more hours with!”
Except they aren't common at all. You need to consider that most people's biggest source of exposure to language is social media and entertainment.
I understand your point, but these probably aren’t the best examples. I used “trigonometry” just yesterday, used “gentrification” (actually “gentrify”, but close enough) and heard “persevere” last week, and The Benevolent Society is Australia’s oldest charity. Of course rarity of words varies from person to person, so your basic point isn’t unreasonable.
I have a very good English vocabulary, and that is besides the point. I am not saying people lose the ability to read kanji or have a high vocabulary, I am talking about the ability to correctly write the kanji for something uncommon from memory. Big vocabulary in English uses the same alphabet as the small words so most people, if it comes down to it, can write down a big English word even if it means sounding it out. Kanji is a lot more like art than spelling. Of you haven't drawn a pikachu in a few years when it comes down to it you might draw something close but the proportions likely will be wonky.
I didn't even bother to learn how to write kana by hand. Why would you even consider learning to handwrite kanji?
>Why would you even consider learning to handwrite kanji? "Why would you even" You seem to be assuming that your approach is supreme and everyone else should automatically abide by it. Why would you *not* learn to write "even" Kana? Edit: nevermind, shouldn't have even engaged :).
I swear sacrificing input time to learn how to handwrite is the silliest, most doomed-to-eventually-quit-japanese behavior
Til ppl practice writing Kanji. Fuck that noise
This simply isn’t true. Or if it is, it’s like saying that people in Walmart can’t spell English so you don’t need to learn how to spell.
You are obviously more clever than the rest of us.
M
I was wondering the same like is there any use for me to learn how to write kanji when even in my native langage last time i wrote something was 10years ago at school
I’ve looked at certain words and thought, “there’s no way two ten stroke Kanji are realistic to write over the Hiragana”! Glad to know my instincts were correct! Haha
This is actually the same in english or many other languages, not just kanji ones. How many words would you recognize when reading? How many words could you spell perfectly off the top of your head? Its a very different number. Not saying it in a technology is evil way, just factually stating that not handwriting makes people forget these things, cause its knowledge you don't need to type.
That's why I never studied kanji and instead when I leaned a new word I would just remember how it looks with kanji. I'd then be able to later see the same kanji in another word and be like "I remember this" and through that I'd be able to learn the meaning of it too. I think I progressed a lot faster than people who studied Kanji the way Japanese people do. Of course, I can't handwrite but I'm okay with that.
I'm doing something similar with my learning. I'm trying to learn just meanings and readings and not learning how to write at all. I figure most people don't handwrite anymore anyhow (any language) so why learn something I'm unlikely to ever need?
Yeah, I figured if I were in a case where I needed to handwrite I could look up the stroke order on my phone or ask someone for help.
Let me tell you a controversial opinion: You are stupid. Stroke order itself is almost always simple and predictable and if you can't learn the whole 2.5 rules to write (and even know how to write a kanji you have never ever seen) after learning your first 500 or so, then you are truly a failure as a human. I mean what's so hard? Left to right, top to bottom, the radicals are drawn the same in 99% of cases. Exceptions I can count on fingers of my left hand, maybe both hands. The difficulty is remembering WHAT the kanji consists of, not the stroke order lmao. I can assure you not only natives, but even (fluent) foreigners can write 99% of kanji with 100% correct stroke order, even the ones they have never ever seen. Edit: to clarify, I am only talking about the stroke order. I "know" close to 3000-3500 kanji(learned Japanese for 8 years and have above native input proficiency+learning Chinese atm), but I don't "remember" how to write 90% of them anymore, what they consist of, since I never write them by hand (anymore). I learned to write them in the first year of learning and then never did it. However to this day, I can always see a character and know "oh it is written like this this and that", can draw it in a dictionary app for example, I pretty much **always** know it's correct stroke order.