[getoj]

Character amnesia is a unique phenomenon to hanzi/kanji and is absolutely incomparable to English and French orthography. Native Chinese and Japanese speakers learn characters largely through muscle memory, which deteriorates rapidly if you don’t regularly write by hand. Many university-educated adults are unable to write a supermaket shopping list without hesitation.[1] Conversely, in English I learn difficult spellings (Gloucestershire, syzygy, rhythm) by aural-mnemonic tricks which stick around in my memory essentially forever.

Whether this had any effect in this study, I don’t know, but it certainly seems relevant that the experience of writing by hand in Japanese is utterly different to any alphabetic script.

[1] Don’t take my word for it, here’s an interesting blog post on the topic: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473

[gwervc]

> Don’t take my word for it

Don't worry, I have some knowledge of Japanese and Chinese (traditional) and first hand experience of the phenomenon. If you can visualize the character you can write it, and I maintain that this is not as different as people makes it than visualizing the writing form of a word for a language written with a morphophonemic script (English, French, Korean without hanja, Thai, etc.)

[ClimaxGravely]

I've been studying Japanese for years and while SRS reading methods help to some degree, writing is the only thing that's really helped me lock in Kanji. Especially at the intermediate level where kanji not only look similar but are pronounced the same.

SRS : Spaced repetition system. Anki is a good example of that.