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I used to know how to write in Japanese

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Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#11

Post by 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.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#13

Post by sixothree »

roxolotl wrote: post #10

This reminds me of one time I mentioned to someone I had aphantasia and their response was “how do you spell!?” Seems wild to me that some people see words in their head to spell them but I guess at least one person does. I do wonder if that means they’d have better kanji recall for writing.

It’s real. I didn’t know it was a thing until a few years ago then suddenly everything made sense.

I’m glad people are talking about it.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#14

Post by larsiusprime »

If native speakers are starting to have character amnesia too, does that suggest in the long run you would expect the writing systems to simplify towards the phonetic syllabaries? Or is the fact that we have computers as a mediating tool going to forestall that and just make things weird?

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#15

Post by dodos »

lyall wrote: post #11

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 str…

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.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#16

Post by timr »

Being able to read but not write Kanji is so common that it's a meme amongst Japanese people -- to the point where it's a game. For example, here you can watch some Japanese television people play a game where they compete to write words in 10 seconds or less:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQQqLno9hw

I (and every other learner) have the same problem. It's not special, and has nothing to do with aphantasia.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#17

Post by xdfgh1112 »

lyall wrote: post #11

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 str…

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.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#18

Post by apt-apt-apt-apt »

sixothree wrote: post #13
roxolotl wrote: post #10

This reminds me of one time I mentioned to someone I had aphantasia and their response was “how do you spell!?” Seems wild to me that some people see words in their head to spell them but I guess at least one person does. I do wonder if that means they’d have better kanji recall for writing.

It’s real. I didn’t know it was a thing until a few years ago then suddenly everything made sense. I’m glad people are talking about it.

What is aphantasia, specifically?

I don't consider myself to have aphantasia. If I close my eyes and try to 'see' with my eyes the letter 'm' or an apple, all I see is the back of my eyelids– pitch black.

If I then try to 'see' with my mind the letter 'm', I can imagine the shape and drawing the shape, but it never appears in a physically visual manner. I can trace its lines with my eyeballs, but try as I may to hallucinate an image, it's still only pitch black always. The closest I come to seeing it is being very confident that I know exactly what 'm' looks like, and that I could take that mental model and draw it exactly on paper immediately.

Do some people have such a clear and strong mental image that they can effectively inspect, zoom in and manipulate a mental image as well as a real visual image, and that's considered not-aphantasia?

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#19

Post by timr »

lyall wrote: post #11

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 str…

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.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#20

Post by syncsynchalt »

optiot wrote: post #7

Is ワープロ馬鹿 really a term used by native Japanese speakers? As far as I can tell it only really shows up in Japanese->English dictionaries and English forums (see https://www.google.com/search?q="ワープロ馬鹿"+-a+-the ). edit: s/word/term

> Is ワープロ馬鹿 really a word used by native Japanese speakers?

You probably mean idiom. ワープロ (word processor) and 馬鹿 (baka: idiot) are individually both words used by Japanese speakers. Japanese speakers would be more likely to say 漢字健忘 (kanji amnesia) to refer to the phenomenon though.

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