[lyall]

When learning Japanese, I purposely chose to _not_ learn how to write any of it by hand. As the author notes, writing (by hand) is in fact a separate skill from reading. So I decided I would not invest my limited time, motivation, or brain space to writing.

Overall it's been a successful approach, and I recommend it to new learners unless they have a particular interest in being able to write by hand or they feel strongly that writing the characters helps them remember them.

It's only rarely that I have to write anything other than my own name in Japanese. I've practiced my address but writing it in English is fine in 99% of situations. Being able to write properly would save a little embarrassment, but I still believe my language learning time would have a much higher ROI in other areas.

[timr]

I went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you, I almost completely abandoned it as soon as I didn't have to take language school tests anymore.

It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards.

As a partial aside, the Heisig anecdote that leads off this piece is painful:

> Japanese children learn the spoken language first, then they learn how to write it in elementary school; Chinese students of Japanese (who tend to be pretty good at it) have pre-existing knowledge of character meanings and forms from their mother tongue, so they only have to learn how to pronounce them. Therefore, a Western learner should first focus only on the meaning and writing of those couple of thousand common characters and, only after having mastered those, should move on to studying the pronunciations.

Going from "Japanese people learn the spoken language first" to "you should spend a big chunk of time learning characters before learning sounds, words or grammar" is a pretty remarkable mental backflip.

The author says he spent eleven months doing this before devoting any time to the spoken language. If I could put the "head exploding" emoji here, I would do it. I spent only slightly more time than that at language school, and came out conversational.

[lyall]

Yeah I agree. I way over-indexed on learning kanji (via WaniKani) at the beginning of my Japanese learning journey. I got about halfway through before realizing it was silly that I could read 健忘症 but didn't know many very basic hiragana-only words. It wasn't timed wasted but it probably wasn't the most efficient approach.

In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then move on to kanji later. But writing is a very useful tool in learning, and having access to that tool can help speed things up.

Like most things in life, a balanced approach is probably the right one. But you have to know what your goal is. Our brains are lazy, they only get better at what we make them get better at. If your goal is to just read kanji, practice reading kanji. If your goal is to understand and speak the language, practice listening to and speaking the language. But if you want to have a balanced language ability, you'll need to practice it all.

[timr]

WaniKani at least teaches words. Spending almost a year of your life doing nothing other than learning "meanings" of individual Kanji is...well, I guess some people just really get addicted to that mechanical feeling of progress?

Reading is definitely helpful, but I've found the relative importance of reading, listening and speaking goes in cycles, and especially at the early stages, listening and speaking are far more motivating than anything else. And I'm an introvert!

[thaumasiotes]

> In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then move on to kanji later. But writing is a very useful tool in learning, and having access to that tool can help speed things up.

There is no connection between these two sentences. You can learn to read and write in Japanese without ever learning a single kanji, and that's what everybody does do. Kana serve the purpose flawlessly.

[Macha]

With 0 kanji, it's such a small subset that it's hard to call that a finished job of learning to read or write as you'll be limited to material like kids books or NHK news easy.

[Cyan488]

Yes, I ignored Kanji completely while learning Japanese. I only learned words in hiragana and katakana from my SRS decks. I regret it because it locked me out of a lot of comprehensible input I could have used to actually progress in ways apart from learning the sounds of lots of words (even the sounds I learned were often wrong because I never heard anyone speak the words I was learning).

[CamperBob2]

Am I the only one reading this thread and thinking, "Gee, this sounds like a job for AI?"

Why in the world should any human not from Japan devote limited time and brain capacity learning to read and write Japanese? It's literally a robot's job, at this point.

[coffeeling]

In an ideal world, some kind soul would escort kanji behind a shed and we'd hear a loud bang, then marvel at how we can suddenly just read words we've heard for years.

[TimorousBestie]

Wanikani did add some common hiragana-written words into various levels. Not many, but at least nobody hits 60 without learning これ anymore.

[pm215]

Yes, I agree that trying to learn kanji upfront is a silly idea.

Heisig says in the introduction to RTK I that he learned 1900 characters "before the month was out". If like him you can do the whole set in a month and then have no further need of formal review or study beyond using them as they turn up, then I can see it not being a terrible idea. But as far as I can tell, almost nobody has a mind that works like Heisig's does: people seem to need longer and to rely more on review via an SRS like Anki.

Personally I found my problem with RTK was that I successfully memorised "English keyword to write the character" for 2000 kanji, but this was not at all linked to my actual use of the language, so I still had the problem I started with of "I want to write the word べんきょう but can't bring to mind the kanji for it", because I had no association between Japanese words and the English keywords for their component kanji...

[thaumasiotes]

> I still had the problem I started with of "I want to write the word べんきょう but can't bring to mind the kanji for it", because I had no association between Japanese words and the English keywords for their component kanji...

If you didn't know what べんきょう meant, how did you know it was what you wanted to write?

[pm215]

I knew the word (including how it is spoken and what it means), so I would have no difficulty of understanding if it was said to me in conversation, I could read the word whether in kanji or hiragana, I could compose sentences in my head which used it and use it when speaking, I just didn't always remember how to write it in kanji...

(Here べんきょう is just an example: the same issue applies to essentially every word.)

[jimbokun]

The characters you copy pasted are in a phonetic script called hiragana, conceptually similar to the English alphabet as each character denotes a sound.

The kanji are pictographic characters that often have different pronunciations in different contexts. The kanji for べんきょう are 勉強 (meaning "to study").

[thaumasiotes]

I know that.

In your model of the problem, pm215 knows the following things:

1. There is a Japanese word pronounced benkyoo which refers to activities like reading books with the intent to learn something, doing practice exercises with the intent to learn something, preparing to take a test, doing things that a school might ask you to do, and other similar endeavors.

2. There is an English word "study" which corresponds to the Japanese word spelled 勉強.

But he doesn't know this:

3. In English, activities performed with the intent to learn or review something are referred to by the general term "studying".

I find this hard to believe. Anyone who chose to learn mappings from English words to kanji spellings must be familiar with the meanings of basic English words. He shouldn't be able to think of the activities he wants to refer to without the word "study" coming into his mind, but that was the problem he described.

[pm215]

No, the problem I describe is "I am thinking of a Japanese sentence (which I know the meaning of), and I could write it in hiragana but not in kanji".

This is analogous to "I want to write an English sentence, but I can't remember how to spell one of the words", except it's worse because at least English words are spelled vaguely in line with their pronunciation.

I think where I may have stated the problem confusingly was my reference to not having a link between the Japanese word and the English RTK keywords. RTK assigns one unique keyword to each kanji, which (a) doesn't always line up with the meaning of a word in which it's the only kanji and (b) doesn't inherently help with multi kanji words. In this case benkyou is 勉強 which is two kanji with the RTK keywords EXERTION and STRONG. Unless you actively learn and memorise a link between the Japanese word and this pair of keywords, RTK is not going to help you with writing the word.

[StefanBatory]

It's ~63-64 kanjis per day.

I do imagine someone dedicated would be able to pull that off. But that's still 3-4 hours per day, I guess?

[pm215]

I think the thing that makes it a problem for most people is that they can't memorise them as "once and done" the way Heisig says he did. So as well as the initial time spent looking at the kanji and coming up with a good memorable story/image/mnemonic/etc, most people I think also spend time in an SRS (e.g. anki, or kanjikoohii) reviewing the characters they learnt previously. It's the review time that really stacks up, especially where you have particular characters that you have trouble with ("leeches").

[anigbrowl]

You could pull it off in the sense of 'I've seen this one before...', but no way do I believe that he learned >60/day with good recall. That'd be like me saying I learned the fundamentals of spoken Japanese in one afternoon. I think it's a kind of bullshit claim to be honest.

[thaumasiotes]

Well, I can say that I've spent more than eleven months learning common characters before learning any Japanese sounds, words, or grammar.

But the reason for that is that I was learning Chinese. I spent zero effort on learning any characters preliminary to that. There is no reason you'd need or want character knowledge.

My character knowledge is decent now, because eventually my learning method became "talk with Chinese people over Wechat", and if you do that you will necessarily learn common characters.

[raincole]

The idea that one should learn kanji first just to start learning Japanese is utterly nonsense. The author has Stockholm syndrome.

If one's mother tongue isn't Chinese/Japanese, I guarantee you that's impossible to understand kanji/hanzi as deeply as a native speaker does just by spending 17 months on memorizing how to write them. It simply never happens. Languages come first and writing systems come later no matter which target language you're trying to acquire.

Even native speakers get confused about their own writing systems. It's vs its. Should've vs should of. Doppelganger vs doppleganger. Being able to wield the writing system like a wordmaster is a big plus and a praiseworthy effort. But it really isn't the essence of language acquisition.

[jimbokun]

The time to grind Kanji is when you're ready to really push the breadth of your vocabulary.

While you're still picking up grammar it makes more sense to just pick up kanji here and there as you encounter them.

[anigbrowl]

Indeed. I thought the Heisig approach was garbage on the same basis. I did get a kanji reference book that was a bit more focused on learning the Joyo kanji (ie the 2000 or so you need to graduate high school or pass N1) but I did not stick with it because it also used mnemonics as a learning tool and I found them distracting and obnoxious (in the sense that the author kept injecting his personality into them - sorry dude, I came here to learn kanji, not to learn your opinions on things).

In general I just do not get the mnemonic approach. It's literally another layer of stuff to recall that frequently doesn't have anything to do with the meaning, and the book I had even connected mnemonics in simpler characters to build into more complex ones. Worst of all, you're learning to identify characters with a bunch of word association in English.

Instead of treating chinese characters as a bunch of "tangled squiggles" that you have to memorize or make up stories about you could just ...learn the radicals (called bushi in Japanese). There are around 230 of them, and they are fundamentally pictographic, so the meaning and appearance are linked. Every kanji character is either a radical itself or made up of other radicals, like a word spelled in two dimensions. Some are used much more than others so most of the time you'll be combining the same 32 simple ones. Once you get familiar with them kanji become much easier to remember; a character that is made up of 10 strokes like 勉 is actually made up of just 4 parts which are just a few strokes each. In some cases you can even guess the meaning of a kanji character you've never seen before by looking at the components, but even where you can't, being able to see a complex character as just a collection of familiar simpler chunks makes everything way easier.

You can find a kanji radicals deck on Ankiweb and it's small enough to do alongside your vocabulary or listening practice without being a burden. It will induce a little cognitive dissonance because a few very familiar characters have different meanings in their radical form but you will get over that soon enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_freq... is a great reference, both for the frequency and the simpler table of stroke count. The individual radical pages have additional detail tracing each one back to bone script (the oldest system of writing, etching characters on bones) which make the pictorial evolution very clear.

By the way, a book I do recommend is the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary by Jack Halperin. This too uses its own schema for looking things up, but it's a simple one, based on the shape (left-right/ top/bottom/ nested/ freestanding) and the number of strokes, which makes looking things up fast. It also contains indexes to look up kanji by radical or pronunciation (eg if you have the furigana) so you are not locked into one way of understanding them like mnemonics. It also has common vocabulary that uses the kanji, stroke order, and all that good stuff. And it has a good reference on the rules of stroke order. There are only 8 of them and (like radicals) once you understand the underlying principle you can look at a new kanji you've never seen before and have a pretty good idea of how to write it. You should still check while you're learning, but the more you write the easier it gets.

jisho.org is also incredibly useful, because you can dig into any word to find the kanji within, and then dig into individual kanji to see which radicals they're composed of, as well as looking things up by radical.

[simianparrot]

I am doing both because while learning to write the symbol for a sound/meaning and identifying the symbol’s sound/meaning are separate skills, they enhance the fluidity of _thinking_ in Japanese significantly for me. It has a synergistic effect and to me seems to improve the brain’s understanding and efficiency in compressing the knowledge.

But my goal is not just to read and understand but to talk conversationally. While Japanese is very different from my other languages, I’m already multilingual (Norwegian, English, Dutch and German) and this approach has always worked best for me.

[cosmic_cheese]

I might have to play with writing alongside vocab reviews.

Back in the earlier days of the online Japanese learning sphere (when AJATT was still the big new thing), I tried learning by starting with writing by studying kanji independently, but that went nowhere even after several months in.

More recently I’ve been making a point of audibly speaking the sentences associated with vocab cards and that’s helped a lot with being able to fluidly speak the various long trains of sounds that are common in Japanese but rare in English as well for improving recall and improving reading speed. It would follow that writing might enhance that effect.

My foremost goal is to become conversational too. The rest should follow more naturally if I can achieve that.

[creakingstairs]

I’ve taken your approach as well but I did notice that I retain Kanjis that I learn to write significantly more than ones I can just read. But memorising all the Kanjis is a bother.

I found the sweet spot to be writing on a scratch pad as I go through Anki. And not particularly worry about getting writing right too much. Sometimes I’d be confused in my head but my muscle memory would kick in and automatically write the kanji!

[alisonatwork]

Yeah I made the same decision learning Chinese. It's just not worth the extra time and effort relative to the utility.

Occasionally I still have to sign my name, so I specifically picked a name that a) was written the same in both simplified and traditional and b) had a low number of strokes. Like you, the only time this has bitten me is in hospitals and banks where occasionally they ask you to do stuff like write out your address. I sometimes exercise my dumb foreigner privilege and ask the clerk to help, but since addresses have a formal romanization method it's often fine to write that, and I've seen enough locals struggle I don't feel too bad about it.

[dodos]

The one thing I noticed when I was focusing on learning to write is that it helped me a lot with differentiating between similar characters when reading. I forget which ones now, but there are many characters that differ by a single radical and have similar meanings, knowing how to write each one helped me quite a bit there, but overall I rarely write anything other than my name and address now that I live in Japan.

[jwrallie]

Even if you cannot recall and have to type in your phone first (as natives do often for unusual ones), at least you can write it much faster because you are not just copying.

I think it’s useful to do RTK with SSR and, once you finishes, you only need about 15 min of maintenance per day to keep it in memory.

[xdfgh1112]

I can confirm this. I passed N1 without learning to write. I later learned how to write all of the kanji, and all it does it help you distinguish very similar kanji without context. I tried learning all the compound words (i.e. which kanji to use for every word) but gave up a few thousand Anki cards in. It was time consuming and impractical. (Wanted to pass Kanken 2) Props for anyone who put in the work though.

[pessimizer]

Don't drill words drill sentences (no Japanese word means an English word, and no English word means a Japanese word.) And don't fall in love with any of the sentences, move on to new sentences. Eventually the knowledge accumulates, but only through volume and variety.

[xdfgh1112]

If that worked for you cool. My Anki deck is a lovingly curated set of sentences that I enjoy.

[zdc1]

I'm learning traditional Chinese and found that writing helps me recognise the components and strokes when reading the same characters.

If I just try and visually pattern match with flash cards, anything that's hand written or in an stylised font will throw me off. If I can sympathise with / recognise the stokes used, I find it easier to tell what character they're trying to show.

[hintymad]

You strategy makes sense. Truth be told, even native Chinese and Japanese tend to forget how to write many characters as they spend more time typing than writing.

[idahoduncan]

I'm following this approach. One of the most interesting things so far has been observing just how separate recall and production are. There are kanji that I can recognise instantly, and recall meanings and pronunciations, but I can't visualise them at all.

[goosedragons]

It is a separate skill from reading, but I think it's still useful.

At the very least learn the strokes of common radicals. In my experience things like denshi jishos can be VERY picky about how you input them. It makes word lookup much faster IMO anyways.

[BrtByte]

I think your advice makes a lot of sense for most learners: prioritize the skills you'll actually use, and don't feel guilty about skipping handwriting unless it personally matters to you

[thaumasiotes]

> It's only rarely that I have to write anything other than my own name in Japanese.

I thought they had stamps for that.