Tips/guides on learning to WRITE Japanese?

9 comments

1. Repetition and repetition

2. You could do a daily diary, which would help both handwriting and writing practice. For just remembering/practicing stroke order, there are a few apps that can help. I have been using Ringotan and have liked it enough. It’s a bit finicky sometimes but I liked it far better than Anki.

   Ringotan is an SRS system that has you essentially predict the kanji’s next stroke using your finger on your phone. Some people might be turned off from drawing with their finger; however, in my personal experience I have found that finger drawing was sufficient for remembering how to write with pen/paper later, despite not practicing with it. My actual handwriting looks pretty bad because I rarely practice it, but my ability to remember the character and stroke order with pen/paper when needed has been very good (and that was good enough for me).

   Before I used to only use WaniKani (which only practices recognition) and found I couldn’t actually write just kanji I could recognize. Ringotan pretty quickly was able to catch me up so I’ve been pretty happy about that.

3. Learn the stroke order rules and how they’re applied. Some people don’t pay attention to the rules and just prefer to learn every stroke order for every individual kanji, but that’s less efficient because stroke order tends to carry over.

   For example, if you understood how to write 里 and 予 and you knew about the “left side first, then right side” rule, you’d know just by looking what the stroke order for 野 would be. If you knew the stroke order for 田 and 心 and you knew about the “top first, then bottom rule” you wouldn’t need to look up how to write 思.

4. I tried to do this but it was so time consuming I quit after like 400 kanji

   I just want to warn you, this might be one of those “choose your battles” moments.

   Writing is great don’t get me wrong.

   I would say learn to write 100 or so just to get a good feel for stroke order, then quit while you’re ahead.

5. I have two particular study methods that I use which involve handwriting. For both, handwriting is not the point, but I end up doing a lot of it in support of my vocabulary studies.

   While going through an Anki deck, if I come across a word I don’t know or don’t remember, I physically write it down along with its grammar and definitions. I then write it again about ten times or so. And then I continue with my flash card review.

   I’m also reading a novel in Japanese and use a similar approach here as well. If there is a sentence which contains words I don’t know, I copy the whole sentence, highlighting the new words. I then make notes on grammar and definitions of each unrecognized word and drill each about ten times.

   This method is absolutely not for everyone, it is certainly time consuming, but it’s been working a lot for me.

   I’m learning vocabulary in context and I’m pounding out repetition.

   I went from barely able to read to being able to start writing intermediate level sentences without copying from a source over the course of several months. And that’s with maybe an hour or two of studying a day at five days a week (I do this every free moment I get while on standby at work or on breaks). And honestly, I should be spending more time on it.

   It’s hard, but worth it (depending on your needs/goals).

6. Have a high pain tolerance

   Mental stability is also good but not mandatory, actually less mental stability might actually help

7. Gel pens. Little resistance and good stroke marks.
   Notepads. Just fill em up and toss the old sheets.

8. Just write. Practice writing with your hand. Listen to sentences and write them down. Copy textbook sentences and phrases with kanji. Most textbooks come with audio components. If you know anyone with advanced Japanese literacy or native speakers, show your writing and ask for feedback. My 2cents.

9. (to preface: I’m assuming you’re trying to train *recall from memory* here too, not strictly practice neat handwriting alone)

   > One idea I had was making my own anki deck for kanji that included stroke order and doing that.

   That’s a good idea. Word on the front (plus meaning or an example sentence, potentially, for disambiguation), kanji spelling and relevant stroke order diagram(s) on the back.

   To work a little smarter:

   – Take a look at some [general stroke order guidelines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order) and the [basic types of strokes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_(CJK_character)). Don’t memorise these or anything, but familiarise yourself with them so that you’ll start seeing some stroke order patterns earlier than if you went in blind.

   – Build from the ground up, from simple kanji to more complex ones, and if a kanji appears as a component in another kanji, learn *that* kanji first (just to distribute the workload of learning the motions as evenly as possible) (e.g. ideally, learn how to write 言う and 舌 before learning how to write 話す). If you follow some sort of list here (I’d say look up what kanji the Basic Kanji Books teach) that should provide a good enough structure (certainly better than a random order).

   – **Edit:** I alluded to this earlier, but don’t learn how to write isolated kanji; learn how to write actual *words* that are spelled using your target kanji instead. Which brings me to…

   – Don’t try to learn new vocab with this too, it’s an unnecessary extra burden. As much as possible, just learn how to write words that you already know phonetically. In fact, if you already know a word’s pronunciation and meaning, then you’ll be able to…

   – Take advantage of **kanji composition** (namely, semantic and phonetic components) for ease of memorisation of its kanji spelling.

   – **Semantic components** are related to a kanji’s meaning. For example, if you know how 言う is written, it gets easier to recall how to write the ご (語) in にほんご or たんご (“this is related to speaking/words so… ah, that’s right, the left side is 言”).

   – **Phonetic components** clue you in on a kanji’s on’yomi. If you know how to write 五, then it gets easier to recall (most of the) other half of 語 thanks to the phonetic association (ご) (>!the actual phonetic component in 語 is 吾 — but 吾 itself contains 五 as a phonetic component, so 五 is, like, a nested/second-order phonetic component in 語!<).

   – So, keep an eye out for and try to leverage these sorts of connections between kanji you’re trying to learn and kanji you already know.

   More on the workings of kanji:

   – [Way too many people aren’t aware of the 4 main types of kanji](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/ohs9zz/way_too_many_people_arent_aware_of_the_4_main/) (kanji classification is related to kanji composition) (I encourage also reading the more extensive articles on the OP’s blog thingy)

   – [What They Never Told You About Kanji: 六書](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOj4zOcNdak) (kanji classification, again — largely overlaps with the above, but you might appreciate a second explanation)

   – [Why Japanese Kanji Suck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K95xsKPur0) (talks about kanji simplification)

   – [Wikipedia on Kanji Readings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Readings) (take note of the possibilities of 義訓 and 熟字訓, which are essentially 訓読み for kanji *compounds* rather than singular kanji [non-standard and standard, respectively])

   – [The history of 線](https://imgur.com/a/wvDb3hz) (or, a brief history of kanji; brings a lot of what is discussed above together and presents it in a neat chronological fashion — also a pretty entertaining read, if you ask me)

   **Edit 2:** ^ Feel free to return to these every once in a while too, as your arsenal of kanji grows and you get more and more familiar with the overall logic of the writing system. You may be amazed at how much more you’ll get out of them on a reread/rewatch.