Can I skip learning the Kanji?

14 comments

1. Your friend who is fluent wouldn’t happen to be bi-lingual would he? If he is, then his advice is kinda not gonna work on you.

   Another possibility: Did he mean skip learning to “write”, then you can do that if you want, but you can’t skip learning to “read” them

2. How in the fuck can a person who does zero writing and has zero kanji knowledge claim to be fluent in Japanese with a straight fucking face.

   Why do you think that the answer to this question can be “yes”.

3. Info: What does “fluent” mean?

   It’s really difficult for beginners to assess the language proficiency of a person. That said, I know people who know more Japanese than me and can’t even read a restaurant menu, but I can have pretty fluid conversations on certain topics. It really depends on what your goals are. Personally, I’d say it would be a mistake to not learn at least a little here and there as I couldn’t imagine not being able to read anything and constantly having to use Google Lens/Rikai-chan or some other OCR (optical character recognition).

   Edit: I should also mention, Japanese has A LOT of words that sound the same, but have several different meaning/kanji/accents (like the English “too”, “to”, and “two”). Such as the infamous はし：橋、箸、端、嘴、階 and those aren’t even all of them…

   母は花が好き is a lot easier to parse than ははははながすき, but that’s one of the extreme examples.

4. Not realistically, no. You don’t need to be able to write them by hand, but you do need to be able to read them.

5. Out of curiosity, how do you know he’s fluent? There’s a good chance he’s not and you’re just too lacking in prior knowledge to know better.

6. > who is fluent in Japanese,

   Do you mean fluent like a five year old child?

7. Sounds like your friend is trying to make themselves feel better about their own deficiencies.

8. Maybe he referred to not learn Kanji itself only vocabulary, I mean you don’t really have to know all the kanji and his meaning, this is no useful. You can learn a word and recognize then although you don’t know the meaning of each Kanji in the word.

9. I’m Sorry to say this, but if you want to skip learning the kanji part of Japanese, you should just chose an other language instead. Why even bother? It’s like “I want to learn how to play the piano, without knowing how to read sheet music!” Of course, you can learn some simple stuff. You can learn how to play twinkle twinkle little star. It can be a nice hobby. But you can’t learn more difficult pieces, and certainly you can’t “master” the piano. (I heard about a blind person who is a great piano player, but I don’t think it’s common).

   As for Japanese, you can learn the basics without learning kanji. (Like how to introduce yourself, how to buy something in the shop, and maybe you can chat about some easy topics like weather, and your family). But when you reach a certain level, you won’t be able to proceed. For example you won’t understand difficult words consist of 3-4 kanjis. You wont be able to speak about difficult topics in Japanese. No, you don’t have to memorize every single kanji. But at least, please learn the basics, and a logic behind it.

   (Sorry for my mistakes, I’m not a native English speaker)

10. A lot of snobbery about kanji in this thread. Japanese children spend twelve years of their lives learning the kanji while their brains are still growing and while being 100% immersed in the language right from the womb. There’s no way any foreign speaker can equate that with some puny Anki deck. But yes it is entirely possible to become fluent in the language without learning the kanji. It’s just a system to write down the immutable parts of the language. All the grammar happens in hiragana. Kanji offer some slight and haphazard mnemonic advantage in learning the vocabulary but that’s only after you’ve sunk hundreds of hours in memorising the kanji in the first place. Japanese children already know 2000 words before they even learn their first kanji. Of course without kanji there’s no hope you will be able to read any Japanese text so you will be functionally illiterate. It depends on what to want to do with the language.

11. yes and no!

    Yes you can skip writing them

    No you need to know how to read them.

12. Can we ban this question from now on? Every 6 hours with this nonsense. Where are the mods?

13. I tried that for a few years and reached a level of conversation I was fairly happy with, but eventually did take up kanji, mainly with the goal of increasing vocabulary. At that point I wished I had started on kanji earlier. Since I’ve become serious about them, kanji have taken up way too much of my study time, at the detriment of grammar and output practice. Overall, in any language I agree with the naturalistic approach: prioritize listening first, then speaking, then reading and writing — just like we all did in our native tongues.

14. I’d go step further. GO, and skip learning Japanese at all. I’ve been once in Japan, and managed to handle this without knowing japanese at all.

    /s