[saubeidl]

I should have clarified. My goal in learning Mandarin is only conversational fluency, not literacy.

I don't bother with the Hanzi past being able to recognize them. I want to be able to talk to people and, if I have to, use a pinyin keyboard to write basic sentences.

So only 1 & 4 are really relevant, 2 is what Anki is designed to do.

[KPGv2]

Literacy shouldn't matter for the definition of knowing a language anyway. Orthography isn't language. It's a symbolic notation that represents a language. Blind people don't speak a different language from non-blind people. Illiterate people can still speak language. Children still speak language. Humans in societies where writing systems do not exist still can speak language.

Writing a language makes you more skilled at living in the modern world. It's not a threshold past which you must travel to count as a speaker of that language.

[saubeidl]

Yeah, that's pretty much my thinking also.

By cutting out the memorization of Hanzi, I am able to accelerate my actual goal of having conversations with people.

In Silicon Valley speak, I think the term would be "ruthless prioritization" .

[KPGv2]

Also you can probably still write. Just not by hand. Which is a vanishingly useful skill.

Unless you're applying for something in China, you don't need to know how to write hanzi ever, except for very one-off instances like "I can write happy new year in Chinese"

You know how many times I've written "real" Japanese by hand since 2005? Zero. I've written my name and stuff, sometimes I'll write 愛 to show my daughters. Nothing else. Because it's a worthless skill unless you live in Japan. Not even visiting. You live there.

Of course I type all the time. But typing is speaking + reading. It's not writing. You type phonetically (i.e., you know how to say the word), and then you hit spacebar until the correct kanji comes up (i.e., you can read kanji).

[zelphirkalt]

Thanks for clarifying, that sounds reasonable then.