[adrianN]

In my experience, unless you want to be able to write characters without machine assistance, it's faster to just learn to recognize them without spending time on writing them out. Being able to recognize the rough stroke order is a little helpful, but not necessary unless you want to look up characters by stroke count. But since tools for character lookup are fairly sophisticated today, you don't really need paper dictionaries anymore. The only benefit I can see is in the ability to read handwritten characters. The "cursive" script is basically impossible to read unless you know the stroke order really well.

[bayesian_horse]

Are you able to read 2000 characters fluently?

I'd be interested because so far I mostly hear from people trying this approach, but not actually succeeding.

I would agree that the value of writing characters diminishes quickly after the first few hundred.

[xiaomai]

I can read a few thousand characters (I pick up new characters by adding flashcards (using Anki) when reading novels written in Chinese). At this point I rarely encounter characters I can't read (but there are frequently words I don't know).

I can only write a handful of characters (probably less than 100?).

I probably would get the characters mixed up less frequently if I practiced writing them, but I don't think I would have been able to learn so many if I was doing that.

[bayesian_horse]

That sounds like you actually did practice writing the characters at the beginning. Which is my strategy also.

[adrianN]

I can read about 6000 Japanese words. I can read NHK News articles with moderate effort if I have access to a dictionary. I'm not sure how many characters that is and I would be hard pressed to give meanings or complete lists of pronunciations for most characters in the words I recognize. Most sources I've read recommend against the study of characters in isolation. Some recommend ignoring characters completely until you're somewhat fluent, but I prefer reading real texts for self-study over working through textbooks.

[bayesian_horse]

For Japanese, I think that is good advice, especially because the characters often have Japanese or japanized pronounciations and are assisted by Hiragana.

In Chinese, writing characters, and knowing their meaning helps a lot more, I guess.