I’m currently studying around 2100 Kanji by JLPT level and at the moment i have about 280 memorized. The app I use asks you to write the kanji from memory when reviewing, but you can turn it off of you want. I’ve recently noticed it might be slowing me down- should I just focus on memorizing Kanji based on recognition like when I see them? Or should I stick with writing practice with them as well?
6 comments
yes, the more senses you engage the better your recall
that also means using it in context
be careful just swallowing thousands of kanji, they are meaningless on their own and won’t enable you to read. only words make sense, and only in sentence context. you can rote memorize if you like, but it’s only useful to the degree that it helps with vocabulary memorization
if you just started, attempting to consume the entire joyo kanji set is way beyond what you need and you’ll forget them all before you actually need them again
memorize words. spelling, pronunciation, meaning, and usage context. the kanji will come along for the ride
I found writing helped me a lot. Not necessarily being able to write everything from memory, but at least writing out things that weren’t sticking.
Writing with speaking out loud also (e.g. if I was writing 番犬 i would say ばん, けん when doing the individual kanji, then ばんけん when complete)
Yep 🙂
Yup. I find writing out Kanji by hand and in actual words (not the Kanji in isolation) helps a lot with retaining that Kanji’s readings.
On the other hand though, just doing Anki is so much quicker for getting a lot of Kanji in. Quality vs. quantity. If you mix Anki with reading as well, it might even be flat out better.
What’s the app you use?
I’ll go against the grain and say yes, it will be slowing you down considerably.
Learning to write kanji will definitely help you differentiate them since you know exactly what strokes are in each kanji, rather than recognizing them through sometimes confusing combinations of radicals like in RTK / Wanikani etc. However, unless you want to work in a Japanese environment, learning to hand write kanji is a poor use of your time because it is a huge time sink for not much practical benefit, as opposed to learning to recognize more kanji and the vocab that goes with them, working on your reading, aural comprehension etc.
It depends on your goals: if you want to work in a Japanese company then yes, kanji will probably be necessary (although less so now that more things are done on computers). However if you just want to live in or visit Japan, reading and oral communication skills are vastly more important than being able to hand write kanji, so that should be your primary short- to mid-term goal.
I’ve lived in Japan for 5 years and I can’t write shit apart from my address. However putting that time into learning how to communicate face to face with other human beings has paid off one thousand fold.