typing/writing ability difference

8 comments

1. You really don’t need to learn how to write by hand if you aren’t living in Japan. Even if you are, it isn’t a necessity unless you need it for work. Even if you do learn, if you don’t use it every day, you’ll lose it. You have to determine if it is cost effective for you to learn how to write. It’s good to get a feel for stroke order though so that you can at least copy a character while looking at it. You should also at least be able to write the kana.

2. That’s normal because it’s a lot easier to recognize and choose the right kanji from a list then to replicate the kanji exactly by hand from memory.

3. Use the write function on google translate to write kanji you need to look up. That’s a good way to remember characters.

   Japanese doesn’t give you the intuition for remembering kanji (too many homophones). A lot of the times in Chinese, the characters build on both rimes (tones) and rhymes. But a lot really only work with traditional characters and not simplified or Japanese shinjitai. Even my parents forget how to write some kanji sometimes so don’t fret too much it’s normal.

   Edit: I have the opposite problem. I don’t type in Japanese so writing ability is much higher.

4. It’s not a problem for me because I currently don’t expect to ever have to write something by hand in Japanese for any reason. I know if I tried I’d fail miserably for almost all of the kanji and words I can read except for the most basic ones like 車. It’s a skill you need to practice like anything else. But I self study and don’t live in Japan, so handwriting words is currently way down the bottom of my priority list. One day I’d like to do it to be more well rounded, but today is not the day.

5. yeah definitely

   typing is going to perfectly emit kanji for you

6. My Japanese teacher says that even native Japanese people are generally better with a keyboard than with writing on paper! Technology has replaced writing by hand in a lot of contexts. I wouldn’t worry about it at all.

7. This is a problem affecting all of Japan. Of course it’s much easier to just recognize characters instead of remembering how to write them. It’s passive vs active memory.

8. I live in Japan, and while I can write hiragana and katakana, because I never have to write by hand, I’ve completely forgotten how to write all kanji.

   Typing or reading is perfectly fine, just writing has diminished. The Japanese friends I’ve made have said they experienced the same thing after college.

   I’ve made peace with it, writing by hand is a dying skill anyway.