I have seen some posts about how you have to write them to learn them and I do agree with that but what I want to ask is: Will I, when I am going to move to Japan, actually have to know how to write every kanji out of those most important 2000 or so?
For the N5 kanji that I know it did help me to write them 20 times or so, but now even if I do recognise them while reading I still can’t remember how to write some of the most complicated ones and since those are the easier ones I do feel that something is not right. Escepially since some take way more time to write and are really hard to get right since even my writing in cursive is pretty ugly as it is.
So what I want to know is:will I, as a resident of Japan, have to know how to write 2000 kanji or will I just need to be able to recognise 2000 and write maybe not even half while replacing the rest with kana?
Thank you.
5 comments
Not important at all. As long as you can recognize the kanji it should be fine. Unless you have trouble reading the kanji, then i would suggest writing them out several times to help remember. I’m Chinese, and i don’t even remember how to write some basic Chinese characters. It’s just not like English, where u can sound it out and guess the general spelling.
I mean, think of the last time you had to handwrite a note to someone else. It’s very rare. Your computer automatically converts romanji to hiragana to kanji, so worst comes to worst just type it into your phone and then write down the kanji based off what it shows. As long as you can read you don’t really need to know how to write
Lazy people make a much bigger deal out of this than it is. Knowing how to write makes it a lot easier to recognize weird fonts, handwriting etc. Even if you aren’t writing it yourself. You *see* handwriting reasonably often I’d bet. Especially if you count handwriting style fonts, signage, etc.
And for some people it really helps with getting things into your memory.
But you don’t *really* need to memorize “how to write” 2000+ kanji in order to basically write all of them. If you learn a much smaller amount (maybe a hundred or so?) the patterns will be obvious for most of them. The slightly irregular ones aren’t nearly as important as knowing basically how the common components are written.
Not necessary at all. Just helps with remembering and as someone else already said: it makes it easier to recognise Kanji in weird fonts.
It’s not important unless it’s something you want to learn.
That being said I’ve tried to learn kanji meanings a few times now, and doing it with writing has made it all retain much better, and makes me take the time to do it.