Readit NewsIt'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.
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’m almost locked into emacs because of magit lol
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25023673
Does this mean that the offline digital cash problem has been solved, as far as in-person customer to merchant payment system goes?
You can trust an arbitrary person giving you money through the card just as well as if they gave you cash. Could you turn this into a pay-anyone-money using cards and card readers?
One other limitation in place is that these transit cards have a limit of ¥20,000 (~140 USD) max that can be loaded on to them. So any transaction larger than that is out of the question.
So to answer your question, no this isn’t really a person-to-person cash replacement. It’s a transit card that happens to be able to be used as an offline payment method, but it’s got various limitations and weirdness that prevent it from being something more.
also it is nearly impossible to fire anyone in Japan for anything