I was speaking with a friend of mine from Osaka who I went to college with, and he was telling me this. Other than the few handwritten notes and writing addresses, after school most adults forget/get out of practice handwriting kanji, beyond the most common kanji. I found that really interesting. I have been telling myself how crucial it was for me to get stroke order down perfectly or else I will be judged.
by DelicateJohnson
26 comments
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.
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.
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.
Clearly comprehension, being able to read it, is more important. Most people all over the world type these days.
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.
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.
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.
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).
While I’ll stop worrying so hard about stroke order, writing things really helps me remember so I’ll keep doing it anyway xD
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.
Just to note that “the most common Kanji” would still be 1000+ characters
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?
Writing is the last thing someone should be learning as a beginner, unless you are studying specifically for something that requires you to write.
Listening and reading are the two most important skills to acquire, and a beginner should spend most of their time on improving these.
Speaking comes after that, and will be helped a lot by listening and reading.
Writing is mostly unnecessary (when was the last time you wrote something by hand?), but may be useful if it’s required for your work or hobby (e.g. keeping a physical japanese diary).
Use it or lose it. Simple as.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
This actually is a bit encouraging lol
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.
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
Just race through an app like 漢字忍者 and you’ll know how to write the most common 1000
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