How important is it to be able to write down the kanji on paper?

8 comments

1. Depends on what your goal in learning Japanese is.

2. Unless you want to learn to write, it’s not necessary. You can learn to read without that step and save a lot of time.

3. It is not strictly necessary to know how to write all the kanji you learn, but it may help with recognition and recall (as it adds another mode of interaction with the material). And learning to write them forces you to actually look at the parts of the kanji (there are always surprised “I never noticed that!” reactions around here whenever someone mentions that “wait” 待つ and “hold” 持つ and “especially” 特に are written with different kanji, or that “kanji” 漢字 and “school” 学校 share no character).

   And I think it is very helpful to know how kanji are written in general (including stroke order) because it helps reading handwritten Japanese and more extravagant, artistic printed fonts.

4. If you live in Japan or want to live here, absolutely mandatory. Japanese beaurocracy is all pen and paper.

5. For most people, not important. For texting, you type the word on a romaji keyboard and it recommends the kanji.

6. I’ve fount out that i often confuse similar kanji and began to write them down to more clearly differentiate between them. I use ringotan for about 15-20min a day and it improved my recognition drastically.

7. Unless you want to write, you don’t need to learn how to write. However, writing them is a good way to get them to stick in your memory

8. Handwriting is fun, I would encourage it even if you don’t plan on writing by hand in the future as it adds another way to connect the material you’re learning. The brain is very good at remembering things with lots of connections, it’s very bad at remembering information that exists in isolation.

   However it is definitely very low on the list of priorities if you want to maximize your time usage.