When I came to Japan, quite a while back now, I was probably a typical foreigner: I was on a crusade to learn to write *every kanji that had ever existed*, even if it was one that nobody used anymore. “No way will I use a mobile phone or electronic dictionary, it’s the old ways for me, writing each kanji ten million times until it becomes muscle memory!” kind of thing. I made a point of learning to write the ridiculous ones (薔薇, 麒麟, 鬱病 and so on) because, well, I was probably a typical Japan geek. Fast forward close to two decades, and now I think I’d struggle to write most of the commonly used ones, because the majority of communication is done by computer, smartphone, etc. It’s still important to know the shape of them if (classic example) you want to differentiate 合う from 会う from 逢う, but as long as you can do that, the predictive text and so on does so much for you.
My ability to understand their *meaning* has skyrocketed, but that’s just from regularly reading things in Japanese and having a job where the ability to read Japanese is essential. But if you put a pen and piece of paper in front of me and asked me to write the characters for even fairly common words, I’m not confident that I could do it. Heck, I asked my wife, who’s an educated Japanese national, about kanji in general and she said “I guarantee that I can read them, but I don’t guarantee that I can write all of them”.
What say you, residents of Japan?
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26 comments
Technology has made it so that we never need to write the kanji out by hand. As an immigrant here, I don’t plan on ever learning to write kanji by hand….waste of time 😂
I can’t write kanji
But when companies ask for writing skills it usually means being able to type and that’s it, so it’s enough to know how to read
Typical foreigners try to learn how to write every kanji by hand?
Beginner Japanese student (living in Tokyo) here. I’ve been getting down on myself lately for not knowing how to write kanji. I can recognize and read a bunch but struggle to write them. This thread makes me feel better
What kanji skills?
Pretty similar story to OP. Was up to bring able to write about 1000 kanji, now I struggle to write my own address since I so rarely use a pen.
Interestingly something similar has happened with English too. My notes are completely illegible
I speak nearly native Japanese and can write exactly 0 kanji despite being able to read over 2000. Technology has made the need to write kanji in my life nearly 0.
You lost me at “typical foreigner.” WTF does that even mean?
I used to be able to write around 1000 kanji in 2013~2014 or so. Now I sometimes struggle to write in hiragana or katakana.
I started learning the language 25 years ago. The technology has been great to me because I hate handwriting and I haven’t really needed to handwrite at any serious level.
I’m a published author in Japan and I can read and type mostly anything, but if I need to write by hand I’m virtually a fourth grader until I type the thing on my phone and copy it.
After a decade of failing to gain literacy by not learning kanji properly, only knowing a few hundred to look at, I pulled the trigger on an app that makes you write the kanji in a spaced repetition and since April have been doing those on and off daily.
It started off easy but as I got to around 350 kanji or so I started to slow down a lot, now at about 650 kanji with about 70% accuracy in recall.
Back home I was the sort to browse second hand bookstores. Not being able to do that has been a major drawback, and one good way to improve written and spoken Japanese is to read a lot. Until I have at least a High School level of Kanji and I can’t do that without it being a chore, so my aim is to learn how to write a thousand kanji, use that to improve my vocabulary, and read daily until rather than a challenge it starts to become fun.
Without baseline literacy I’ll always be at a disadvantage, and since I’m likely to be here long term, and have a kid who will want help with his homework in the future, I’d be stupid not to aim for basic literacy, and technology has helped attain that goal.
In Japanese school: writing ✍️ everyday, including kanji. Nice handwriting and doing quite well! Out of school and using laptop/phone all the time: can only write a few, will forget how to write halfway, even sometimes forgetting some kana…very sad.
This is kind of a universal problem in Japan lately, even among natives. People are great at handwriting until they finish school and enter the workforce, and then it slips away because most of the real world is digital…
You guys have kanji skills?
Handy being Chinese
Forget Kanji, I struggle to write hiragana and katakana properly. I’m Chinese so my Kanji looks good enough but my hiragana and katakana looks like a 5 years old wrote it
The same experience. Downhill for the past 10 years.
Kids These Days will never know the joy of figuring out the radicals to look up a mysterious kanji in Nelson’s Kanji Dictionary, or using the Canon Word Tank…
Me too. When I came here before the age of smartphones and when most people didn’t have internet, I learned all the joyo kanji by hand. Now I can’t think of the last time I wrote kanji by hand except for a simple shopping list meno or something.
When I had a flip phone here, it really helped for remembering Kanji. I would see Kanji all around and be like, wait, I think I know that. And open up my phone’s shitty dictionary thing and type until the predicative text gave me the right reading.
Best thing ever for my writing was the old DS kanji dictionary where you write on the DS screen. That thing ruled
I use Wanikani to learn Kanji and I have never used paper pencil to write and practice.
I’m the opposite, my job involves me hand writing kanji a lot, yet i can read bareley any. I learnt the stroke order, and i just copy off the computer. They get me to do the hand writing because its the neatest kanji in the office.
I basically can’t write a single kanji and honestly I can’t remember how to write some katakana or hiragana.ワープロバカ ftw
My subpar thesis revolved around such ワープロばか theme (the ability to recognize written kanji but failure to recall the same characters when it comes to writing them down by hand among beginner Japanese learners). Let’s say I was inspired by real life examples (myself, among others).
It blew my mind when I realised I could read probably double the kanji I can write from memory. I’m amazed that each skill is held in clearly seperate parts of the brain. Nothing more alien than writing a character and instantly knowing something is wrong with it but at the same time not knowing how to make it look right. Fascinating
Thank you for this thread. I lost 90% of my kanji writing ability since leaving Japanese language school 5 years ago. Literally never need it, except to write my address and fill out the occasional form…but that’s maybe a few times a year. Definitely not enough to maintain…
I tried several times to relearn, but I realized I would probably need to dedicate time every day to practicing for the rest of my life…There never will be a time where I get to dedicate 8 hours a day every day for 12 years writing kanji, so I’ll never get as good as a Japanese person.
I’m glad it’s not that my brain is melting or something. Sounds like people way smarter and more experienced with japanese than me are going through something similar, and I take great solace in that. Thanks 😂