How has this worked out for you?
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Hard to say.
At present, I still have difficulty consuming native material due to the amount of unfamiliar kanji, vocab, and grammar. (Most of what I read is Satori Reader, which is dumbed down a bit for students.) Relative to those gross defects, I’m not able to assess whether my imperfect grasp of certain nuances or grammatical technicalities is hampering my understanding. Likewise, I’m not in a situation where I have to use Japanese in daily life (e.g. living in Japan) so there’s no way to get feedback on whether my “good enough” really is or not - and in any case I’m not at a point where I can produce natural-sounding output.
Better to ask me in five years, maybe.
There are precedents for not completely understanding a language while studying it - Tadoku, for instance, where the idea is to consume a large amount of text without worrying about perfect understanding. But my approach is based more in seeing how people who are learning a second language actually speak and function in the country where that language is spoken. None of them are perfect. I don’t think it’s realistic that we should be either.
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このパワー…
Is being able to write kanji a practical skill when living in Japan? Can you give examples of times you were glad you had studied it? Well done!
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My perspective, for people who can’t/don’t want to grind SRS 3 hours a day, is that pretty much anyone can learn 2000 kanji in 3 years if they stick with it. Simple math: 3 years = about 1000 days = 2 kanji per day. And 3 years is really fast compared to the pace children learn the characters in school.
Personally I wish I spent less time on SRS and forced myself to practice handwriting on physical paper. I prefer writing notes on pen and paper, but I can’t really do that in Japanese. I mean I can physically write the characters with the correct stroke order, but it’s just too slow and stressful because I never built the habit.
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I don’t even know if 2000 is the right primary target for a beginner. Sure, if you want to read day-to-day japanese comfortably you need well over 2000 kanji, but even with “just” a thousand or so you can already do a lot, as long as you don’t mind choosing easier reading material and looking up unknown kanji regularly.
According to my SRS app I currently know 728 kanji and I can read “light” material to a point where I find that grammar and vocabulary knowledge are usually more limiting than pure kanji knowledge (although I do have to look up many kanji).
For instance I just went to NHK easy, opened the first article and got:
野球の世界一を決めるWBCで、日本が優勝しました。23日、試合があったアメリカから選手たちが日本に帰ってきました。大リーグのチームに入っている大谷翔平選手などはアメリカに残りました。
The only kanji I don’t know here is 優 (although I recognize it from 優しい, but I don’t know the onyomi), and also 翔 but IMO it’s a bit different because it’s part of a place name and those are always problematic for all sorts of reasons.
At any rate when I read this sentence I feel more limited and slowed down by my knowledge of grammar and vocabulary than kanji. As another random example I was playing a game earlier and stumbled upon the word 気配. I know those kanji, but I had no idea what “spirit distribute” would mean, so I had to look it up.
Of course I still intend to actively drill kanji and would like to reach ~2000 within a year or so, but I think that it’s important for beginners to understand that they can do a whole lot with a whole lot less. Otherwise many will just give up early on when they realize the amplitude of the task at hand…
And conversely the people who only focus on Kanji learning (for instance by speedrunning WaniKani without doing anything else until they’re done) will have a bad surprise when they finally try to apply their knowledge in the real world and realize that they recognize 99% of kanji but are unable to make sense of anything but the most basic “私はアメリカ人です” sentences.
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I mean, you aren’t wrong but this thread is about someone who already had a foundation in Japanese learning to write kanji by hand, not about learning to recognise kanji as a novice.
I started to learn to handwrite kanji once I was already comfortable recognising maybe 1500ish (I never did any specific kanji study, just vocab - maybe 5k+ words in SRS at that time) and it really is a lot smoother when you’re learning to write something you already know pretty well, normally from multiple words. I’ve never used mnemonics or anything like that as it isn’t necessary.
I do think the difficulty of kanji is overstated compared to vocabulary or speaking and many beginners fixate on kanji a bit too much. Having said that, it is basically impossible to keep your skills perfectly balanced and if you really enjoy studying kanji and it is your hobby then there is absolutely no harm in it.
(I will say that every time I am reminded of this thread I am tempted to drop my vocab SRS and spend a year going hardcore on kanji writing - realistically I could rely purely on reading for vocab at this point but also it is scary dropping an SRS)
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despite what people say, yes it is vital to living here. I often use even rudementary kanji any time I write a lesson, if a student does not understand a concept in english and I know the kanji for it, it is a huge boon to be able to write the kanji and they understand. plus when drinking, showing off your best kanji (䯂 like that one) is a great way to make friends due to them being rather easy to impress if you’re a foriegner who can write kanji. lol.
for some reason there’s a strange thing going about hat you can live in japan without writing kanji, that just is not true. I’m not even that far into my studies (roughly n4) and I’ve probably written more kanji than most college students in america learning japanese.
A very common time to write kanji is your home adress for documents. Japan is very much so a paper country. and if you have a samsung phone like me, most of the city kanji is not in the phone so you end up needing to either remember the kunyomi for every city kanji or write it out via finger/stylus.
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I think most people who argue that knowing to write kanji is useless are people who don’t actually live in Japan and just do tourism there, a week or so at time. I can imagine that in these conditions you may not have many opportunities to show off your mad kanji skillz.
Which is still an important datapoint for learners given that I expect that the vast majority of them will never end up living in Japan.
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Even then, worst case scenario you never use it. You’ll still have the kanji better in your memory for future study. It’s like learning vocabulary. Having it and not being it is better than needing and not having it.
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Oh I 100% agree, I don’t have scientific data but I feel much more comfortable with kanji since I take the time to do writing drills daily. I almost never mix them up anymore (although I embarrassingly confused 念 and 意 earlier today, but I think that it has more to do with the fact that there’s a certain overlap in meaning which makes me conflate the two).
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I’m mainly doing it as I find it quite a relaxing and enjoyable thing to do. Whilst my drawing/writing skill has improved, I unfortunately can’t quite say the same about my ability to recall the kanji. I’m not doing it to the same extent as the title of the post however.
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These are really nice!
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I’ve lived here for 6 years and the only kanji I’ve ever had to physically write was my address and sometimes some other personal information if I have to go to city hall for something. I mean, my town is probably on top in terms of inaka-ness and even here most things are turning digital.
履歴書, which also used to be required to be handwritten, are lately becoming accepted as a typed PDF (especially in I.T. fields).
I mean, yeah, learning to write kanji is a helpful skill, but I wouldn’t say it’s absolutely required to live here.
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I don’t think that writing is 100% necessary (been living in Japan for 3 years), but it is a useful skill of course, especially if you work in a Japanese company.
The main reason I chose writing over mnemonics is that the effort input/benefit gained makes a lot more sense to me personally. This is how I see it-
Mnemonic - Memory gained through a story.
Writing - Memory gained through muscle memory/careful shape recognition.
Mnemonic - Once memorized, must then learn all the readings anyway.
Writing - Can memorize readings while writing without too much extra mental load.
Mnemonic - You’ll never think about mnemonics while actually reading a book, so essentially the ‘end goal’ seems to be to forget the mnemonic and just know the kanji instinctively.
Writing - Instinctively knowing the kanji is still the end goal, but you’ll also always retain the ability to write it thanks to muscle memory.
It’s kinda like that one cartoon character that everyone can draw cause they drew them 1000 times when they were a kid, so the shape just becomes ingrained (for me it was Dag from Angry Beavers). Muscle memory is crazy strong.
So essentially with writing you gain one extra skill along the way, while with mnemonics the goal is to not need that mnemonic in the future. Writing just gives you way more bang for your buck in terms of time investment. Just my opinion.
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that’s quite impressive, just today I had to write a lot of kanji just filling out a short application for a basic japanese class (like entry level) here in japan. they wouldn’t accept typed responses. then again I’m in Tottori, the literal most backwoods part of Japan. maybe your town is larger than you think it to be.
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Less than 3000 people.
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It’s kinda like that one cartoon character that everyone can draw cause they drew them 1000 times when they were a kid, so the shape just becomes ingrained (for me it was Dag from Angry Beavers). Muscle memory is crazy strong.
Bumping this thread because I want to see your illustration of Dag.
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Ask and you shall receive.
Weird thing about this picture that I learned to draw of Dag is that it was only half of one side of a picture of him fighting with Norb, I just never learned the Norb half 
. Hence why one arm is missing and he’s looking off into space.
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I’m looking forward to your new bunpro-style site where we just draw Daggett every single day.
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Beautiful! Now you just need to add Norb as part of the Kanji studies and you can have both!
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