Small nuance, but the term ワープロ馬鹿 actually is unrelated to software like MS Word, and refers to the at one point ubiquitous ワープロ (Word Pro) dedicated hardware device that many Japanese people owned in the 80s/90s to write letters. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor#Japanese_word_p...
Interestingly the English Wikipedia page above only mentions Japanese word processor devices in a small section, but the Japanese version of that page is almost entirely dedicated to these hardware devices: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3...
I was lucky enough to live with a Japanese family in the early 90s and used one to learn how to type Japanese but also write letters home in my own language. I guess you had to live through this age to understand the difference of how Word Pro is used and the hardware association it has in Japanese.
The other weird thing about that term is that it's somewhat uncommon to see 馬鹿 actually written out in kanji, as those characters mean horse and deer with no direct association with 'idiot' (the proposed etymology is a reference to Chinese history and/or a Sanskrit loanword). I guess in a way the kanji form is a word processor autocomplete tell.
A Toshiba Rupo word processor (found in both links) is safely stored in the backyard shed, together with some floppies and documentation. That'll be my winter project next year.
This article actually hits on a pet peeve of mine where I feel people sorta “mystify” kanji/hanzi unnecessarily.
The truth is that there’s actually nothing particularly weird about being able to read some kanji but not be able to write them…
You actually get close to my point here:
> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
Yes! But have you ever heard of someone forgetting how to spell certain words in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (e.g., English)? I can use myself as an example here: while writing this comment, I forgot how to spell “peeve” in “pet peeve” (I thought it had an ‘a’ in it) and I also forgot how to spell “unnecessarily” (I thought it had one n and two c’s).
The western equivalent of being able to read some kanji but not write them is simply called bad speling. No need to mystify kanji in particular.
Nice comparison. When I was living in China, I'd encounter someone who forgot how to write the characters for a word on a weekly basis. I think the difference is that with Latin alphabets you can still misspell something, and having gotten it down on paper, still rely on phonetics to convey your meaning.
Alphabet is such an underrated invention. It's probably higher in significance compared to the invention of wheel. It's the original "bicycle of the mind". For example, Korea pivoting from Chinese characters to its own alphabet or Hangul is very well documented including the positive effects it has in the much improved Korean literacy and civilization after the conversion. Fun facts anyone can learn Hangul alphabet in a single day if they wanted to but the same cannot be said to Chinese characters. If your mother tongue is Korean (e.g Korean American) that only just started learning, it only take one day turnover from illiterate to literate.
This happened with cyrillic to me. During Yugoslavia we had to learn both latin and cyrillic. Since I'm from Croatia, I didn't have a need much for cyrillic (or at all). Today, I can read _at speed_ (including subtitles) cyrillic just fine, but I probably couldn't write a thing if my life depended on it. It's weird when I think about it.
> > Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
When I was in grade school, I took notes for my classes using Tengwar (elvish) runes as a way to alleviate boredom and force myself to pay attention (just taking the table in Appendix E from Lord of the Rings and transliterating English letters into them). I could do this at a speed sufficient to keep up with a teacher talking, so pretty fast. I cannot read any of these notes today, much less write them.
If you don't use this stuff for a few decades, you do forget, even when it's just an alphabet.
I learned how to write cursively in school, but as soon as it was no longer mandatory I switched back to print capital letters and some years later to print letters entirely, as it was just much easier for me to make legible.
At this point, it's fair to say I _have_ forgotten how to properly write cursive capitals, if I tried I'd just end up with print capitals with random tails for most of them.
I don't think anyone is "mysticizing" the language. It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.
IMHO spelling is an inapt analogy. Every single word I can communicate orally, I can write. Sure I might mess up "I before E" or some other minor issue, but I'm BUILDING the word from first principles, e.g., syllable phonemes. That's why kids are taught to "sound it out" at a young age.
The closest equivalent you have in logographs might be radicals.
> I don't think anyone is "mysticizing" the language. It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.
People absolutely do mystify the operation of kanji, like they're more than scribbles that point to words, or that Japanese would fall to incomprehensibility and ruin if they were done away with.
> It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.
This isn't quite true - about 80% of Chinese characters are so-called phonosemantic compounds, where people originally started using the character for one thing for another thing whose word sounded similar (say, emoji for "can", as in able to) and then adding a semantic component to differentiate the character from other similar-sounding ones. In Chinese, they smushed the two components into the space of one character, but in eg. Egypt, they simply wrote whe semantic clarifier and the phonetic hint side by side, full size.
That is, the majority of the characters are primarily sound-based, it's just that the connection between a character and its sound is shoddy, even in Chinese languages.
Japanese kun readings for native words do divorce the characters pretty completely from their sound.
Yes! I've studied Japanese for years and read numerous novels in it each year, yet I couldn't physically write to save my life.
But there's nothing crazy about that, like you said it's similar to spelling (not entirely, as I can spell things fine if I have a phonetic keyboard that "writes" for me).
Writing vs reading to me, is more about the type of memory.
> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
I’ve actually done this all the time as a bilingual speaker with my language in Cyrillic. It doesn’t happen often but once in a while I’ll freeze and be unable to remember which glyph makes which sound when switching alphabets/languages.
>> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
> Yes! But have you ever heard of someone forgetting how to spell certain words in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (e.g., English)?
Erm... great that you gave English as an example but I'd argue this mostly applies to English. I remember wondering why "spelling bee" was a thing when watching shows from the USA because that wouldn't make any sense in Polish. Same with Spanish. And a lot of others. There are some minor things to remember and you can do errors but in 99,(9)% of the cases it's "you write what you hear".
It could have been a case for English as well but the reform efforts were killed so here we are with all it's quirkyness :)
The reverse almost happened to me before, I write almost exclusively in cursive and once or twice had to stop and think about what a capital Q was supposed to look like.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is very common in Chinese now. The older generation, many of whom didn’t learn pinyin, just use voice input to send messages; the younger generations just use pinyin input and similarly can’t handwrite beyond the simplest characters.
The phenomenon of forgetting how to write is called 提笔忘字 (tíbǐwàngzì - to pick up the pen and forget the character). It was previously covered here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41959256
Not really. Even in English there are only a few possible ways to spell out a given sound. With Chinese characters that mostly goes out the window, making speaking and writing more or less orthogonal skills. Not entirely since there are classes of characters that are related by sound, but to a much greater extent than alphabetic languages. Personally if I forget a spelling in English or a related language I realize that my approximation looks wrong and can correct it by elimination, whereas with Chinese characters it's common for people to simply not have a clue how to even write the first stroke of a word they've heard and read before.
> How is it possible for you to "see" the text in your mind and not be able to replicate it with a pen? Even if the mental image is faint and fuzzy, surely you can sketch it out roughly at first, then refine it until it settles into its exact form? Apparently, that is not how mental images work, either.
That's really not how it works. I draw as a hobby and I love to study human anatomy. I can conjure in my mind people in many poses with detail, in different clothes and colour. Still the act of drawing without a reference is a world in itself. If I try to sketch from memory without a reference, it quickly falls apart.
It's not that the mental image is incomplete, wrong or an illusion. Is just that knowing it and reproducing it are two very different things.
What if we call this 'constructive recall', in which your mind needs to take a concept and generate the concrete manifestation of it, vs 'recognition', which is the obverse. There are many examples of this in life, aren't there?
Imagine a song you used to love as a kid and knew by heart. Now try to write down the lyrics word for word. Typically quite difficult.
Now play the song and sing along. You not only know all the words, your mind provides you a just-in-time recollection of all the nuance in the delivery, the pauses, the details of the music itself, nearly a perfect replay of the entire song is there in your mind...you just couldn't knit it together like you can when it's there in front of you.
I've noticed something similar when listening to podcasts. If I'm out doing something, typically driving, while listening to a podcast episode for the first time, I will have these intrusive photographic recalls of what I was doing at that time if I listen to it again. At least if I do that within the first few weeks.
Just seems like a general characteristic of the brain.
When I reached upper level Japanese classes (N2/N1), my native Japanese teachers would regularly (maybe once a week or so) have to look up a character they were writing on the board during class.
> On the surface, this atypical trait seems to explain quite well why I can draw a blank when asked to write the kanji for "plant" (植) from memory. I don't see the character in my mind, so it makes sense that I can't reproduce it on paper.
While the author's aphantasia may have posed some recall issues - it wouldn't explain why they had ever been able to reproduce 植. Kanji has the concept of radicals AND stroke order. One could make the case that perhaps the author's motor cortex is simply storing the equivalent of LOGO programming language instructions for reproducing the logograph.
Take away your mind's ability to find and chunk (木, 十, 具) by showing them "radical"-less characters and I'm sure it would be even more difficult.
As someone with aphantasia, I'm also not convinced that is the cause. I can draw better than average from memory, and used to be quite good but haven't practiced for many years.
There are also animators and artists with aphantasia[1].
My spatial recollection is particularly good - I can sketch out precise diagrammatic drawings from memory much better than I can do artistic drawings.
So while it's not impossible that not having aphantasia would've been a benefit to him, I don't think there's much evidence that it's has any big effect on the ability to draw - something that also fits Ed Catmull's experience on surveying his old employees in the article mentioned.
My wife has aphantasia, is fluent in Japanese, and writes the language better than many of our friends who still live there. She was just forced to learn the stroke order, etc when learning the language.
Aphantasia causes many odd issues for her but the ability to write complex languages or draw are not one of them.
Writing characters without knowing the radicals is kind of like spelling without really clearly understanding the alphabet. The stroke order is easy to remember, the radicals make the full characters easier to remember.
Readit News
Interestingly the English Wikipedia page above only mentions Japanese word processor devices in a small section, but the Japanese version of that page is almost entirely dedicated to these hardware devices: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3...
I was lucky enough to live with a Japanese family in the early 90s and used one to learn how to type Japanese but also write letters home in my own language. I guess you had to live through this age to understand the difference of how Word Pro is used and the hardware association it has in Japanese.
The truth is that there’s actually nothing particularly weird about being able to read some kanji but not be able to write them…
You actually get close to my point here:
> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
Yes! But have you ever heard of someone forgetting how to spell certain words in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (e.g., English)? I can use myself as an example here: while writing this comment, I forgot how to spell “peeve” in “pet peeve” (I thought it had an ‘a’ in it) and I also forgot how to spell “unnecessarily” (I thought it had one n and two c’s).
The western equivalent of being able to read some kanji but not write them is simply called bad speling. No need to mystify kanji in particular.
When I was in grade school, I took notes for my classes using Tengwar (elvish) runes as a way to alleviate boredom and force myself to pay attention (just taking the table in Appendix E from Lord of the Rings and transliterating English letters into them). I could do this at a speed sufficient to keep up with a teacher talking, so pretty fast. I cannot read any of these notes today, much less write them.
If you don't use this stuff for a few decades, you do forget, even when it's just an alphabet.
At this point, it's fair to say I _have_ forgotten how to properly write cursive capitals, if I tried I'd just end up with print capitals with random tails for most of them.
IMHO spelling is an inapt analogy. Every single word I can communicate orally, I can write. Sure I might mess up "I before E" or some other minor issue, but I'm BUILDING the word from first principles, e.g., syllable phonemes. That's why kids are taught to "sound it out" at a young age.
The closest equivalent you have in logographs might be radicals.
People absolutely do mystify the operation of kanji, like they're more than scribbles that point to words, or that Japanese would fall to incomprehensibility and ruin if they were done away with.
> It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.
This isn't quite true - about 80% of Chinese characters are so-called phonosemantic compounds, where people originally started using the character for one thing for another thing whose word sounded similar (say, emoji for "can", as in able to) and then adding a semantic component to differentiate the character from other similar-sounding ones. In Chinese, they smushed the two components into the space of one character, but in eg. Egypt, they simply wrote whe semantic clarifier and the phonetic hint side by side, full size.
That is, the majority of the characters are primarily sound-based, it's just that the connection between a character and its sound is shoddy, even in Chinese languages.
Japanese kun readings for native words do divorce the characters pretty completely from their sound.
But there's nothing crazy about that, like you said it's similar to spelling (not entirely, as I can spell things fine if I have a phonetic keyboard that "writes" for me).
Writing vs reading to me, is more about the type of memory.
Recognition vs recall.
I’ve actually done this all the time as a bilingual speaker with my language in Cyrillic. It doesn’t happen often but once in a while I’ll freeze and be unable to remember which glyph makes which sound when switching alphabets/languages.
> Yes! But have you ever heard of someone forgetting how to spell certain words in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (e.g., English)?
Erm... great that you gave English as an example but I'd argue this mostly applies to English. I remember wondering why "spelling bee" was a thing when watching shows from the USA because that wouldn't make any sense in Polish. Same with Spanish. And a lot of others. There are some minor things to remember and you can do errors but in 99,(9)% of the cases it's "you write what you hear".
It could have been a case for English as well but the reform efforts were killed so here we are with all it's quirkyness :)
Dead Comment
Recognition and production are separate skills.
Printing? No.
Cursive? Yes.
I actually can't write cursive at all, but I can usually read it fine. This is because I went to school when they stopped teaching cursive.
But alas, an article entitled "I used to know how to write in cursive" probably won't be very interesting to HN readers...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
While you're still picking up grammar it makes more sense to just pick up kanji here and there as you encounter them.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought they had stamps for that.
The phenomenon of forgetting how to write is called 提笔忘字 (tíbǐwàngzì - to pick up the pen and forget the character). It was previously covered here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41959256
In my experience people often use input methods that aren't pinyin. I tend not to be able to type on other people's phones.
That's really not how it works. I draw as a hobby and I love to study human anatomy. I can conjure in my mind people in many poses with detail, in different clothes and colour. Still the act of drawing without a reference is a world in itself. If I try to sketch from memory without a reference, it quickly falls apart.
It's not that the mental image is incomplete, wrong or an illusion. Is just that knowing it and reproducing it are two very different things.
Imagine a song you used to love as a kid and knew by heart. Now try to write down the lyrics word for word. Typically quite difficult.
Now play the song and sing along. You not only know all the words, your mind provides you a just-in-time recollection of all the nuance in the delivery, the pauses, the details of the music itself, nearly a perfect replay of the entire song is there in your mind...you just couldn't knit it together like you can when it's there in front of you.
I've noticed something similar when listening to podcasts. If I'm out doing something, typically driving, while listening to a podcast episode for the first time, I will have these intrusive photographic recalls of what I was doing at that time if I listen to it again. At least if I do that within the first few weeks.
Just seems like a general characteristic of the brain.
It definitely made me feel better.
> On the surface, this atypical trait seems to explain quite well why I can draw a blank when asked to write the kanji for "plant" (植) from memory. I don't see the character in my mind, so it makes sense that I can't reproduce it on paper.
While the author's aphantasia may have posed some recall issues - it wouldn't explain why they had ever been able to reproduce 植. Kanji has the concept of radicals AND stroke order. One could make the case that perhaps the author's motor cortex is simply storing the equivalent of LOGO programming language instructions for reproducing the logograph.
Take away your mind's ability to find and chunk (木, 十, 具) by showing them "radical"-less characters and I'm sure it would be even more difficult.
There are also animators and artists with aphantasia[1].
My spatial recollection is particularly good - I can sketch out precise diagrammatic drawings from memory much better than I can do artistic drawings.
So while it's not impossible that not having aphantasia would've been a benefit to him, I don't think there's much evidence that it's has any big effect on the ability to draw - something that also fits Ed Catmull's experience on surveying his old employees in the article mentioned.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256
Aphantasia causes many odd issues for her but the ability to write complex languages or draw are not one of them.