Knowing kanji (mainly/especially the meaning) is insanely important and useful for me as a foreigner.
I’m not an expert, but I live in Japan and have been to Tokyo many times.
What advice? Not to learn kanji? Have fun being illiterate, I guess.
If they’re actually Japanese, they definitely have a skewed perspective on this, since they would just naturally learn kanji by osmosis (even if they were “bad at school”)
This guy is talking bullshit
This may be a matter of misunderstanding by the commenter claiming to be Japanese.
There is no shortcut – to not be able to read kanji is to not be fully literate in Japan. To understand only part of the language is to not be fluent, even if competent.
However, many, if not most Japanese people don’t know *all* of the 3000+ kanji. The jouyou kanji are the essential 2136 kanji you will encounter in daily life. In everything from text messages to social media to medical forms to restaurants. They’re literally everywhere, hence **essential**.
Plot twist not a native speaker clearly. Do not trust his advice!
If he were talking about learning how to write kanji then he could have a point, as there are a lot of people that don’t need to hand write anything in a daily basics. But you obviously still need to learn how to recognize/read them.
I also don’t agree with statement like “speaking is the most important skill” or “reading is not that useful” as it really depend on the person. For example I read and watch tons of content in English and but I hardly have to speak it. So from my point of view speaking would be the less useful skill.
unless you have the ability to restart your life and learn Japanese from birth in Japan their advice doesn’t apply to those of us learning as a second language elsewhere. They likely also know Kanji to a much more proficient level than they realise.
Someone like myself I.e. native speaker surrounded with Japanese language, can most definitely say “meh kanji isn’t that important, I didn’t put particular/significant effort in it.” But that has little value, if at all, to a Japanese *learner*. Simple as that.
What learners need is a successful and skilled learner’s perspective. In an extreme sense, the main reason native speakers have value in a learning community is because they know answers to a wide range of questions, and create natural expressions on the spot.
Then we have 化け物 learners that don’t even sound like Japanese isn’t their native language, but that’s another story.
I agree if you are only trying to speak Japanese. But personally I am tryna read manga lol.
Also something very funny about “kanji isn’t that important” plus “but ofc I know most of them”. Even though I think I know what he means.
I’m Japanese and don’t agree with him. It’s not a good advice for non-Japanese people learning Japanese as a foreign language; however, it could be applicable to uneducated Japanese people unable to work in white-collar jobs.
You can replace Kanji with “English spelling and grammar” and Japan with Australia. The same principle applies. Like, “u ain’t gonna need bloody english grammer n proper spelin here in Aus. Work crap at Macca’s, get paid, and live the bloody life.”
Yeah Japanese people heavily downplay the importance of kanji.
I don’t think it’s bad faith, I just think they don’t realize how awful their life would be if they didn’t know kanji.
Also many jp people are baffled when told they probably can read between 2500 and 3000 kanji. A lot of them don’t think it’s above a thousand.
So take advice from japanese people with a grain of salt on this topic
I can understand someone saying learning Kanji beyond an N2 level won’t be as necessary as learning up to an N2 level but Kanji is pretty important for lots of things.
I personally love reading, so Kanji is critical but even if I didn’t like reading, I live in Japan and there’s just stuff that I need to be able to read on a daily basis.
If your only goal is to speak with Japanese people and you don’t intend on reading novels (only manga) and you don’t want to live in Japan, I guess I can see some reasoning in not learning how to read beyond a few hundred Kanji. Traveling to Japan would be easier with more though.
The only thing that always gets me: unless you’re living in Japan, how do you honestly expect to even learn the language without being able to read it? Romaji will only get you so far.
What a load of horse shit. You need to be able to read to function in a society. Signs? Menus? News? Communication via text? The list goes on.
Ive learned a lot of Japanese just from learning the meanings of the kanji, even though I often mistake on or kun yomi. Even when I can’t phonetically work out a word, knowing the kanji often gives you meaning in context-
Point being kanji as an ideogrammatic system is core to understanding the language and will help your comprehension even if your not great at it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit.
Can you read a book without kanji?
Can you play a video game without kanji?
Can you watch a foreign movie with subtitles without kanji?
Do people on like internet forums put kanji when posting?
Are we sure that Japanese guy is not only talking about writing kanji, but also about reading them?
Cause I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be hard to get through daily life or a job without being able to **read** kanji.
I guess if you want to be illiterate, then sure?
I’m in japan right now, wish I knew more kanji…
I feel like there’s some major missing context here. For starters, do you know for sure that this guy is not talking about just writing? If he’s talking about handwriting specifically then it’s perfectly valid advice. Otherwise it’s misguided at best.
Mega hard disagree. Like, ultra disagree. When I went to Japan with my ~1200 kanji knowledge there was still so much i couldn’t read. Especially food, a lot of it was incomprehensible. Not only that but my main goal with Japanese – to read whatever I want is impossible without kanji and for example when I read manga or twitter posts almost every sentence still contains 1 unknown kanji to me.
For those interested here is my method:
*Now, as a preface I’ll say that my method of learning might be nuts and not everybody would be able to use it, but it suits me.
I place a lot of attention on kanji and I learn them instead of just words. I use the “All in one kanji deck” in anki and what my method entails is to look at the list of words at the bottom of the card and pick a word for each different reading presented there. So it could be 1 kun 1 on word, or 2 kun 1 on words, just a kun word etc. (Sometimes it can even be 5 words fir a single kanji).
This way you learn the kanji readings and increase vocab at the same time. Moreover, you can try and associate the words with the meaning of the kanji.
It might seem hard but after your first 500 kanji the words used start repeating, as in you’ll already know the word for a new kanji. Other than that harder kanji use the easier kanji as their components, and when that happens the harder kanji might retain the reading. For example 工 江 攻 項 功 are all read as こう and contain the first kanji as a component.
Why do I do this? Simple, it allows me to easily search unknown words because I can guess the reading correctly most of the time even for kanji still unknown to me because of the observation described above. Not only that but new words are so much easier to remember when you already have the reading available to you and the semantic knowledge of kanji allows me to guess the meanings and skip wasting time on look up in a dictionary.
As someone who has been living in Japan as a foreigner , for almost 25 years , I really wish people won’t listen to that BS. Not only it is disrespectful to the language itself to say “you don’t need that part “, it is also delusional to think kanji doesn’t matter. I double dare that person to live here long term as a foreigner, probably in a small town in inaka, and tell me once again kanji doesn’t matter. Every part of life in Japan is surrounded by kanji, perhaps it’s doable if you’re only travelling, people around would bear with you, show you English menu or gesture to communicate, but any official material e.g. government communication, local community contacts, medical treatment etc etc are filled with kanji that no way it’s “not that important”.
Even if you don’t work in a 9 to 5 office environment, every job requires you to read, understand and write kanji.
I cannot stress enough how incredibly misleading and problematic for such a statement
I was in Japan a few weeks ago. Ive been studying for about a year. I have maybe like 400 to 500 kanji under my belt. This could be an overestimate. Lets say lowball like 200. Either way I thought I would have enough to do pretty well with reading signs and other things. Probably like 95% of all written Japanese on signs and billboards was completely unreadable to me. Im conversational, and talking to people and making friends was totally fine and doable. I had a blast doing that. But my Japanese felt so insufficient whenever I had to pull out my google translate camera app thing.. and that happened quite alot.
(ofc i know most of them)
Smh
Go to Japan on Google Maps, drop your pin in any city and switch to Streetview. Good luck without Kanji.
I tend to agree with the person and i think too much book study is why a lot of Japanese language learners cant speak very well. People probably practice a lot of Kanji though because they dont have opportunities to practice speaking maybe…. Depends on what you want to do and where you want to work etc etc though so whatever floats your boat.
I actively studied kanji in highschool because we had to. I then thought id never get fluent in Japanese by studying with textbooks and talking to other non-japanese people so I just started speaking to Japanese people instead. Picked up Kanji more so after speaking and its never been an issue in job interviews etc, theyd be happy with my speaking and then treat the ability to read and write as a bonus.
YouTube comments are just garbage, don’t even bother. Their downvotes do nothing so anyone can say whatever they want and get upvoted by people who don’t know shit.
What a bad take. Clearly not a native speaker. I live in Japan, Kanji is extremely important.
I think some people underestimate kanji. Kanji is not just “Look! I can write my name with kanji!” Or “I can write: I eat bread everyday! With kanji!” Kanji knowledge is crucial when you reach higher level Japanese (N2 and N1)
Classic case of a native thinking their take on the native language is always spot-on.
I think there’s a misunderstanding here. For various reasons, it’s best not to study kanji *like native speakers do*, i.e., in isolation, by rote, where you study all the onyomi, kunyomi, etc. Japanese children learn that way because they know all of the words already, the only piece of information they’re learning is the image+strokes. For non-native language learners, It’s much faster and more effective to learn kanji through vocabulary. You can immediately use the vocab, and you’ll be internalizing one of the readings naturally. In comparison, studying kanji takes a lot of energy and time because it’s an overwhelming amount of information, and the dividends are scant.
For example, take 貧血, which I saw this morning. I’ve never studied 貧, but I knew the words 貧乏 and 貧しい, so I could figure out the meaning of the kanji (poor), and I had a good idea of what the reading would be in a compound (びん、ひん). So, together the word meant “impoverished blood”. I took a gander at the reading (ひんけつ), which let me continue on through the sentence and understand the context. As it was on a standard medical questionnaire, it should have been a relatively common blood condition that wasn’t particularly dangerous. The way the sentence was written (“Have you been told by a doctor that you were 貧血”, right next to “Have you been told by a doctor that you had high blood pressure”) means it’s a condition a doctor can measure and confirm for you. Altogether, I suspected it meant anemia. Because it was important and not casual reading, I looked it up with the reading I guessed, and I was right. Good, too, because I do in fact have a history of anemia.
I would even go the extra mile and say after developing your visual memory, you don’t even need to do writing drills once you’re N3. I do enjoy writing my vocab down a couple too times help me memorize the reading/meaning, but you shouldn’t feel forced to write the word a hundred times just to memorize the kanji. Once you can recognize the word with ease, you’re fine. (I’m talking about writing drills in terms of words, not isolated kanji.) You can always learn how to write the kanji later.
Simply put, the amount of energy spent learning kanji does not translate to ability. You will feel like you’re spinning your wheels, because you are, and that you’re not making any progress. This leads to demotivation, depression, and a sense of resentment towards studying and even the language itself. Basically, I believe it’s best to maximize the usability of content/approach so beginners can see the results of their labor and get a sense of accomplishment. They can then use that accomplishment to fuel the more grueling aspects of language learning down the line.
No one wants to suddenly start a marathon, but climbing one little hill isn’t so bad, and you can even see the view below. You’ll naturally want to see an even better view, so you walk up the taller hill next to it. When you get to a place you like, you can stop and rest for as long as you need, or maybe stay there forever, and that’s fine too.
Man how the fuck is the person spewing that shit. Tell the person to pick up a newspaper and see how literate the person is.
Kanji is helpful so you can follow along with audio before you can actually start to parse
You need kanji. I lived in Japan for a year and it was important when reading signs, legal documents, people´s names etc. You can get away with not knowng how to write, but reading is important.
this is BS as fuck
kanji is everywhere, like everywhere, it’s very rare to see stuff written fully in kana, if you can’t read it, learning the language is much much difficult and even if you learn, the possibilities of what you can do with it are very limited if you can’t read text properly
Without kanji, you’re basically illiterate and being illiterate sucks in any language because it shuts you out of many important aspects of life. No street signs, no menu cards, no books and manga, no Japanese subtitles, no newspaper, no information at stores or train stations, no administrative information, etc. Basically no written information at all.
Sure, if you only want to speak Japanese, you might think you don’t need Kanji, but you need to be able to read learning materials if you want advance in fluency level at some point, yet alone JLPT exams. After a certain level, furigana also isn’t present. If you want to consume native material, you need to be literate and that includes Kanji. And at some point, the only way to improve vocabulary and fluency is by consuming more advanced native material and the best way is reading a lot.
Handwriting Kanji is another matter; with keyboards giving Kanji suggestions or auto-filling a Kanji, it’s become easier to type than to handwrite. But you still need to know the Kanji to type.
I don’t really know how these commenters in the screenshots honestly believe they can master daily life in Japan without knowing Kanji, even if they are native speakers. Then it’s especially bewildering to me. From my time in Japan, unless you are in the tourist-rich environments like Tokyo or Osaka, being illiterate in Japanese will humble you very fast. And always needing to search for English is tiresome and limits your independence and opportunities.
As with everything in life, the more you know the better. Skipping Kanji is always a disadvantage.
It’s kind of tough to gauge his reply without knowing the context of the video he’s disagreeing with.
As someone who lives in Japan and can barely read anything, it’s terrible advice. My life would be 100x easier if I could read. I want to emphasize that you CAN’T READ if you don’t know kanji.
Someone lying on the internet? Impossible!
Yeah, no, this is nonsense. Poster is either Japanese and trolling, American with Japanese ancestry (specifically the type who seem to think ancestry includes intimate knowledge of the culture, presumably by way of genetic memory), or is just outright lying on all accounts. One way or the other, kanji is ***mandatory***.
You need to be able to at least read kanji in order to comprehend the overwhelming majority of vocabulary that you will see in *every* context. I don’t mean work, I don’t mean academics, I mean kanji is used on food menus. It’s used in supermarkets. It’s written on the instructions for your stove, your rice cooker, and your *toilet*. And this is ignoring all the forms you will inevitably need to fill out.
You can live in Japan using English, certainly, but if the intention is to live in Japan using entirely/primarily Japanese (and this is better, because the guys who can only speak English miss a *lot* of information), then you need kanji in order to *eat* and to *live*.
39 comments
Knowing kanji (mainly/especially the meaning) is insanely important and useful for me as a foreigner.
I’m not an expert, but I live in Japan and have been to Tokyo many times.
What advice? Not to learn kanji? Have fun being illiterate, I guess.
If they’re actually Japanese, they definitely have a skewed perspective on this, since they would just naturally learn kanji by osmosis (even if they were “bad at school”)
This guy is talking bullshit
This may be a matter of misunderstanding by the commenter claiming to be Japanese.
There is no shortcut – to not be able to read kanji is to not be fully literate in Japan. To understand only part of the language is to not be fluent, even if competent.
However, many, if not most Japanese people don’t know *all* of the 3000+ kanji. The jouyou kanji are the essential 2136 kanji you will encounter in daily life. In everything from text messages to social media to medical forms to restaurants. They’re literally everywhere, hence **essential**.
Plot twist not a native speaker clearly. Do not trust his advice!
If he were talking about learning how to write kanji then he could have a point, as there are a lot of people that don’t need to hand write anything in a daily basics. But you obviously still need to learn how to recognize/read them.
I also don’t agree with statement like “speaking is the most important skill” or “reading is not that useful” as it really depend on the person. For example I read and watch tons of content in English and but I hardly have to speak it. So from my point of view speaking would be the less useful skill.
unless you have the ability to restart your life and learn Japanese from birth in Japan their advice doesn’t apply to those of us learning as a second language elsewhere. They likely also know Kanji to a much more proficient level than they realise.
Someone like myself I.e. native speaker surrounded with Japanese language, can most definitely say “meh kanji isn’t that important, I didn’t put particular/significant effort in it.” But that has little value, if at all, to a Japanese *learner*. Simple as that.
What learners need is a successful and skilled learner’s perspective. In an extreme sense, the main reason native speakers have value in a learning community is because they know answers to a wide range of questions, and create natural expressions on the spot.
Then we have 化け物 learners that don’t even sound like Japanese isn’t their native language, but that’s another story.
I agree if you are only trying to speak Japanese. But personally I am tryna read manga lol.
Also something very funny about “kanji isn’t that important” plus “but ofc I know most of them”. Even though I think I know what he means.
I’m Japanese and don’t agree with him. It’s not a good advice for non-Japanese people learning Japanese as a foreign language; however, it could be applicable to uneducated Japanese people unable to work in white-collar jobs.
You can replace Kanji with “English spelling and grammar” and Japan with Australia. The same principle applies.
Like, “u ain’t gonna need bloody english grammer n proper spelin here in Aus. Work crap at Macca’s, get paid, and live the bloody life.”
Yeah Japanese people heavily downplay the importance of kanji.
I don’t think it’s bad faith, I just think they don’t realize how awful their life would be if they didn’t know kanji.
Also many jp people are baffled when told they probably can read between 2500 and 3000 kanji. A lot of them don’t think it’s above a thousand.
So take advice from japanese people with a grain of salt on this topic
I can understand someone saying learning Kanji beyond an N2 level won’t be as necessary as learning up to an N2 level but Kanji is pretty important for lots of things.
I personally love reading, so Kanji is critical but even if I didn’t like reading, I live in Japan and there’s just stuff that I need to be able to read on a daily basis.
If your only goal is to speak with Japanese people and you don’t intend on reading novels (only manga) and you don’t want to live in Japan, I guess I can see some reasoning in not learning how to read beyond a few hundred Kanji. Traveling to Japan would be easier with more though.
The only thing that always gets me: unless you’re living in Japan, how do you honestly expect to even learn the language without being able to read it? Romaji will only get you so far.
What a load of horse shit. You need to be able to read to function in a society. Signs? Menus? News? Communication via text? The list goes on.
Ive learned a lot of Japanese just from learning the meanings of the kanji, even though I often mistake on or kun yomi. Even when I can’t phonetically work out a word, knowing the kanji often gives you meaning in context-
Point being kanji as an ideogrammatic system is core to understanding the language and will help your comprehension even if your not great at it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit.
Can you read a book without kanji?
Can you play a video game without kanji?
Can you watch a foreign movie with subtitles without kanji?
Do people on like internet forums put kanji when posting?
Are we sure that Japanese guy is not only talking about writing kanji, but also about reading them?
Cause I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be hard to get through daily life or a job without being able to **read** kanji.
I guess if you want to be illiterate, then sure?
I’m in japan right now, wish I knew more kanji…
I feel like there’s some major missing context here. For starters, do you know for sure that this guy is not talking about just writing? If he’s talking about handwriting specifically then it’s perfectly valid advice. Otherwise it’s misguided at best.
Mega hard disagree. Like, ultra disagree. When I went to Japan with my ~1200 kanji knowledge there was still so much i couldn’t read. Especially food, a lot of it was incomprehensible. Not only that but my main goal with Japanese – to read whatever I want is impossible without kanji and for example when I read manga or twitter posts almost every sentence still contains 1 unknown kanji to me.
For those interested here is my method:
*Now, as a preface I’ll say that my method of learning might be nuts and not everybody would be able to use it, but it suits me.
I place a lot of attention on kanji and I learn them instead of just words. I use the “All in one kanji deck” in anki and what my method entails is to look at the list of words at the bottom of the card and pick a word for each different reading presented there. So it could be 1 kun 1 on word, or 2 kun 1 on words, just a kun word etc. (Sometimes it can even be 5 words fir a single kanji).
This way you learn the kanji readings and increase vocab at the same time. Moreover, you can try and associate the words with the meaning of the kanji.
It might seem hard but after your first 500 kanji the words used start repeating, as in you’ll already know the word for a new kanji. Other than that harder kanji use the easier kanji as their components, and when that happens the harder kanji might retain the reading. For example 工 江 攻 項 功 are all read as こう and contain the first kanji as a component.
Why do I do this? Simple, it allows me to easily search unknown words because I can guess the reading correctly most of the time even for kanji still unknown to me because of the observation described above. Not only that but new words are so much easier to remember when you already have the reading available to you and the semantic knowledge of kanji allows me to guess the meanings and skip wasting time on look up in a dictionary.
As someone who has been living in Japan as a foreigner , for almost 25 years , I really wish people won’t listen to that BS.
Not only it is disrespectful to the language itself to say “you don’t need that part “, it is also delusional to think kanji doesn’t matter.
I double dare that person to live here long term as a foreigner, probably in a small town in inaka, and tell me once again kanji doesn’t matter.
Every part of life in Japan is surrounded by kanji, perhaps it’s doable if you’re only travelling, people around would bear with you, show you English menu or gesture to communicate, but any official material e.g. government communication, local community contacts, medical treatment etc etc are filled with kanji that no way it’s “not that important”.
Even if you don’t work in a 9 to 5 office environment, every job requires you to read, understand and write kanji.
I cannot stress enough how incredibly misleading and problematic for such a statement
I was in Japan a few weeks ago. Ive been studying for about a year. I have maybe like 400 to 500 kanji under my belt. This could be an overestimate. Lets say lowball like 200. Either way I thought I would have enough to do pretty well with reading signs and other things. Probably like 95% of all written Japanese on signs and billboards was completely unreadable to me. Im conversational, and talking to people and making friends was totally fine and doable. I had a blast doing that. But my Japanese felt so insufficient whenever I had to pull out my google translate camera app thing.. and that happened quite alot.
(ofc i know most of them)
Smh
Go to Japan on Google Maps, drop your pin in any city and switch to Streetview. Good luck without Kanji.
I tend to agree with the person and i think too much book study is why a lot of Japanese language learners cant speak very well. People probably practice a lot of Kanji though because they dont have opportunities to practice speaking maybe…. Depends on what you want to do and where you want to work etc etc though so whatever floats your boat.
I actively studied kanji in highschool because we had to. I then thought id never get fluent in Japanese by studying with textbooks and talking to other non-japanese people so I just started speaking to Japanese people instead. Picked up Kanji more so after speaking and its never been an issue in job interviews etc, theyd be happy with my speaking and then treat the ability to read and write as a bonus.
YouTube comments are just garbage, don’t even bother. Their downvotes do nothing so anyone can say whatever they want and get upvoted by people who don’t know shit.
What a bad take. Clearly not a native speaker. I live in Japan, Kanji is extremely important.
I think some people underestimate kanji. Kanji is not just “Look! I can write my name with kanji!” Or “I can write: I eat bread everyday! With kanji!”
Kanji knowledge is crucial when you reach higher level Japanese (N2 and N1)
Classic case of a native thinking their take on the native language is always spot-on.
I think there’s a misunderstanding here. For various reasons, it’s best not to study kanji *like native speakers do*, i.e., in isolation, by rote, where you study all the onyomi, kunyomi, etc. Japanese children learn that way because they know all of the words already, the only piece of information they’re learning is the image+strokes. For non-native language learners, It’s much faster and more effective to learn kanji through vocabulary. You can immediately use the vocab, and you’ll be internalizing one of the readings naturally. In comparison, studying kanji takes a lot of energy and time because it’s an overwhelming amount of information, and the dividends are scant.
For example, take 貧血, which I saw this morning. I’ve never studied 貧, but I knew the words 貧乏 and 貧しい, so I could figure out the meaning of the kanji (poor), and I had a good idea of what the reading would be in a compound (びん、ひん). So, together the word meant “impoverished blood”. I took a gander at the reading (ひんけつ), which let me continue on through the sentence and understand the context. As it was on a standard medical questionnaire, it should have been a relatively common blood condition that wasn’t particularly dangerous. The way the sentence was written (“Have you been told by a doctor that you were 貧血”, right next to “Have you been told by a doctor that you had high blood pressure”) means it’s a condition a doctor can measure and confirm for you. Altogether, I suspected it meant anemia. Because it was important and not casual reading, I looked it up with the reading I guessed, and I was right. Good, too, because I do in fact have a history of anemia.
I would even go the extra mile and say after developing your visual memory, you don’t even need to do writing drills once you’re N3. I do enjoy writing my vocab down a couple too times help me memorize the reading/meaning, but you shouldn’t feel forced to write the word a hundred times just to memorize the kanji. Once you can recognize the word with ease, you’re fine. (I’m talking about writing drills in terms of words, not isolated kanji.) You can always learn how to write the kanji later.
Simply put, the amount of energy spent learning kanji does not translate to ability. You will feel like you’re spinning your wheels, because you are, and that you’re not making any progress. This leads to demotivation, depression, and a sense of resentment towards studying and even the language itself. Basically, I believe it’s best to maximize the usability of content/approach so beginners can see the results of their labor and get a sense of accomplishment. They can then use that accomplishment to fuel the more grueling aspects of language learning down the line.
No one wants to suddenly start a marathon, but climbing one little hill isn’t so bad, and you can even see the view below. You’ll naturally want to see an even better view, so you walk up the taller hill next to it. When you get to a place you like, you can stop and rest for as long as you need, or maybe stay there forever, and that’s fine too.
Man how the fuck is the person spewing that shit. Tell the person to pick up a newspaper and see how literate the person is.
Kanji is helpful so you can follow along with audio before you can actually start to parse
You need kanji. I lived in Japan for a year and it was important when reading signs, legal documents, people´s names etc. You can get away with not knowng how to write, but reading is important.
this is BS as fuck
kanji is everywhere, like everywhere, it’s very rare to see stuff written fully in kana, if you can’t read it, learning the language is much much difficult and even if you learn, the possibilities of what you can do with it are very limited if you can’t read text properly
Without kanji, you’re basically illiterate and being illiterate sucks in any language because it shuts you out of many important aspects of life. No street signs, no menu cards, no books and manga, no Japanese subtitles, no newspaper, no information at stores or train stations, no administrative information, etc. Basically no written information at all.
Sure, if you only want to speak Japanese, you might think you don’t need Kanji, but you need to be able to read learning materials if you want advance in fluency level at some point, yet alone JLPT exams. After a certain level, furigana also isn’t present. If you want to consume native material, you need to be literate and that includes Kanji. And at some point, the only way to improve vocabulary and fluency is by consuming more advanced native material and the best way is reading a lot.
Handwriting Kanji is another matter; with keyboards giving Kanji suggestions or auto-filling a Kanji, it’s become easier to type than to handwrite. But you still need to know the Kanji to type.
I don’t really know how these commenters in the screenshots honestly believe they can master daily life in Japan without knowing Kanji, even if they are native speakers. Then it’s especially bewildering to me. From my time in Japan, unless you are in the tourist-rich environments like Tokyo or Osaka, being illiterate in Japanese will humble you very fast. And always needing to search for English is tiresome and limits your independence and opportunities.
As with everything in life, the more you know the better. Skipping Kanji is always a disadvantage.
It’s kind of tough to gauge his reply without knowing the context of the video he’s disagreeing with.
As someone who lives in Japan and can barely read anything, it’s terrible advice. My life would be 100x easier if I could read. I want to emphasize that you CAN’T READ if you don’t know kanji.
Someone lying on the internet? Impossible!
Yeah, no, this is nonsense. Poster is either Japanese and trolling, American with Japanese ancestry (specifically the type who seem to think ancestry includes intimate knowledge of the culture, presumably by way of genetic memory), or is just outright lying on all accounts. One way or the other, kanji is ***mandatory***.
You need to be able to at least read kanji in order to comprehend the overwhelming majority of vocabulary that you will see in *every* context. I don’t mean work, I don’t mean academics, I mean kanji is used on food menus. It’s used in supermarkets. It’s written on the instructions for your stove, your rice cooker, and your *toilet*. And this is ignoring all the forms you will inevitably need to fill out.
You can live in Japan using English, certainly, but if the intention is to live in Japan using entirely/primarily Japanese (and this is better, because the guys who can only speak English miss a *lot* of information), then you need kanji in order to *eat* and to *live*.