Should I have more active knowledge of kanji compounds?

[spyfy]

This is a bit of an odd question, but I noticed that I am extremely bad at one specific skill regarding kanji compounds. And I’m wondering if that is an issue. And I am also wondering how common this issue is.

Let’s take as an example the compound 警察.

The following I can do, no problem:

• When I see this compound written somewhere (in particular in context), I know immediately that it means “police”.
• I can also read it out loud as けいさつ.
• If I want to talk about the police, I know to say けいさつ.
• If I want to write about the police on a computer or smartphone, I would type けいさつ, then recognize 警察 in the list and pick it, done.
• If someone gave me a pen and asked me “write the kanji with the rough meaning ‘admonish’ and ‘guess’”, I could write them, including the correct stroke order.

But here is the one thing I cannot do: If someone gave me a pen and asked me “write the compound for police”, it would be an almost impossible task to me, because I can’t produce “the magic combination”.

I have this issue mostly for “more obscure” compounds (like 宿題, 掃除, 帽子, 封筒) where one of the two kanji seems natural, but the other one seems almost arbitrary. “Obvious/natural” compounds are totally fine (e.g. 大学, 映画, 灰皿).

Okay so why am I writing all this? Basically I am wondering if I should be concerned about this one gap in my knowledge. Basically, my brain has these channels:

1. meaning → pronunciation/kana: fine
2. pronunciation/kana → meaning: fine
3. compound → meaning: fine
4. meaning → compound: NOPE

The reason why I am so bad at (4) is that it is a skill that I do not need in any of my activities: talking, listening, reading, or writing on a computer.

To clarify: Being able to write japanese by hand (in particular more complex stuff that goes beyond a quick note) is not a “skill goal” of mine. It ranks very low in my priorities, close to zero in fact.

But I am wondering if there is a more general reason about japanese learning due to which I should try to learn these compounds more.

Any thoughts?

[hx9]

Kanji in words like 群馬、挨拶、曖昧、躊躇、嫉妬. 10 Kanji you’ll probably end up learning that get used in basically one common word… and the above is it!

True for single kanji words too like 兜、杖、斧、鎧 - hello video games!

Some pairs have a single kanji that’s only commonly used in that word. Examples include the 誌 in 雑誌. Or in place names / names the 菅 in 菅原 or the 輔 in 大輔.

There’s almost no reason early on (or even middle on?) to learn what the kanji mean in isolation early on. Depending on your learning tool, in can be hard to identify these. Here’s how I’d do it in bunpro.

The first results on bunpro for 輔 shows this.

助ける、補助 show up because 輔 might be uncommonly used in those words, and the first time it’s shown is “unclassified”. If it’s not in the JLPT Decks (N5 to N1) or the “A” decks (A1 to A20), it’s probably best to just isolate it as a kanji you learn as part of a word, not by itself.

Here’s 挨拶 just to show another example.

Just one word. Probably not worth using.

Here’s Renshuu.org’s lookup just to show another tool that has word lookup by Kanji.

And surprise! Every single one is just 挨拶, and the 4th one is an archaism!