I studied abroad in Japan for 1 year and long answer short: yes. yes. yes. yes.
Absolutely. My Japanese professor didn’t push kanji enough. I studied abroad for the summer in my third year and found I was almost completely illiterate.
I’ve lived in Japan for 7 years now, and nearly everything has kanji. The only things that don’t involve kanji are those for children.
ありがとございます for all the help means a lot I still got 4 years till I got to my college in Japan but this new info will help a lot!!!
Why do you think that the answer to this question would be “no”?
omg yes
even with a difficult reading system like Japanese, reading is by far the easiest of your four challenges (read, write, listen, speak)
Yes you need to learn the 2136 Jouyou Kanji. After you have done that, go to a supermarket in Japan and pick up the other 1000 😅
Yes.
Kanji is as important as hiragana and katakana. At least the common ones.
Yes – crucial. I was kind of similar to your line of thinking when I came to Japan. “I’ll just learn to speak first, all the other stuff can come later” kind of thing.
Nope, you will be _completely_ incapable of understanding literally every form, sign, application, email, and webform without the help of Google lens or some such (which doesn’t work well enough most of the time).
There are lots of good Kanji resources though – try Wanikani! It even makes it fun.
Many beginners are wondering “but why kanji when I can write and read everything in kana”; but the more you dive into kanji and the more you learn, the easier it actually gets to read a text compared to a text made out of hiragana and katakana only.
Because even if you may not remember the reading of a kanji but know the meaning then you still understand what’s written there. And it’s especially valuable for homophones; sometimes while doing listening I am like “but can I see the kanji for that?”
Take it easy with kanji, don’t rush through them and learn vocab in context instead of solely kanji. Eventually you’ll find you recognise more and more and wonder why you ever wanted to stay at hiragana and katakana only.
idk do your read japanese right to left?
Try to read this without kanji and you will understand why kanji is important: 李も桃も桃のうち
no its not
For living in Japan?
Yes. Absolutely. There is no “But maybe if…” If anything, it’s more important to recognize a few hundred of them than it is to actually speak the language.
15 comments
Yes. Japanese is written in kanji. This is like asking ‘Do I need to learn capital letters to read English?’
The good news is that kanji is not hard to learn. [Beginner’s guide.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/19FEIOJWbLhJQ-AmepxFBMC2ebhJJr9RBUMfMeatYuq8/edit?usp=sharing)
I studied abroad in Japan for 1 year and long answer short: yes. yes. yes. yes.
Absolutely. My Japanese professor didn’t push kanji enough. I studied abroad for the summer in my third year and found I was almost completely illiterate.
I’ve lived in Japan for 7 years now, and nearly everything has kanji. The only things that don’t involve kanji are those for children.
ありがとございます for all the help means a lot I still got 4 years till I got to my college in Japan but this new info will help a lot!!!
Why do you think that the answer to this question would be “no”?
omg yes
even with a difficult reading system like Japanese, reading is by far the easiest of your four challenges (read, write, listen, speak)
Yes you need to learn the 2136 Jouyou Kanji. After you have done that, go to a supermarket in Japan and pick up the other 1000 😅
Yes.
Kanji is as important as hiragana and katakana. At least the common ones.
Yes – crucial. I was kind of similar to your line of thinking when I came to Japan. “I’ll just learn to speak first, all the other stuff can come later” kind of thing.
Nope, you will be _completely_ incapable of understanding literally every form, sign, application, email, and webform without the help of Google lens or some such (which doesn’t work well enough most of the time).
There are lots of good Kanji resources though – try Wanikani! It even makes it fun.
Many beginners are wondering “but why kanji when I can write and read everything in kana”; but the more you dive into kanji and the more you learn, the easier it actually gets to read a text compared to a text made out of hiragana and katakana only.
Because even if you may not remember the reading of a kanji but know the meaning then you still understand what’s written there. And it’s especially valuable for homophones; sometimes while doing listening I am like “but can I see the kanji for that?”
Take it easy with kanji, don’t rush through them
and learn vocab in context instead of solely kanji. Eventually you’ll find you recognise more and more and wonder why you ever wanted to stay at hiragana and katakana only.
idk do your read japanese right to left?
Try to read this without kanji and you will understand why kanji is important: 李も桃も桃のうち
no its not
For living in Japan?
Yes. Absolutely. There is no “But maybe if…” If anything, it’s more important to recognize a few hundred of them than it is to actually speak the language.