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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

#111

Post by NalNezumi »

Don't worry it's common for natives too.

Not born & raised in Japan but went to Saturday school for Japanese in Europe and I was excited to be able to read (and understand) the newspaper for the first time at middle school, because my Kanji caught up. From there it's usually very quick how much Kanji you can learn.

But now, 20 years later? When I need to go to fill forms I flip up my phone and search for Kanji all the time. And I know I'm not alone (although probably very bad by Japanese standards), but I can navigate Japan just fine.

I always struggled to explain this to my European friends. "I can read and talk fluently without any issue, but writing not so much. Unless on keyboard".

The best analogy I've come up with is "If I ask you to imagine an apple or a Motorbike, you can do it right. When you see one, you'll instantly recognize what it is. But if I ask you to paint an apple, or a motorbike, you might not fare too well; people might mistake your painting of a motorbike for a bicycle. It's something like that. Using keyboard is like googling for images and copying it in to your PowerPoint slides"

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#112

Post by h2zizzle »

I find myself having trouble remembering the spelling of certain words, now that autocomplete is almost ubiquitous. It sometimes takes writing them out and looking at the result ("Is it 'beleive'? No, definitely 'believe'.") to remember the correct spelling. Chinese character recall is probably closesly associated with that than with romaji recall.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#113

Post by Macha »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #90
lyall wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> 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 fla…

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.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#114

Post by nottorp »

> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.

No but when I last tried to hand write a long text in the latin alphabet, my hand hurt after a while. Skills atrophy when not used, more complex skills may atrophy faster.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#115

Post by Macha »

larsiusprime wrote: post #14

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?

IMEs have actually caused the opposite a little in Japanese, because you type the phonetic pronounciation and get a list of possible kanji, then with computer use "writing" kanji really means "recognising" and so people will use kanji that they never would have bothered with remembering how to handwrite.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#116

Post by bloak »

dmoy wrote: post #4
prokopton wrote: post #3

I have no trouble reading but writing kanji has become a problem. I never need to do it and I can’t remember how to write kanji I have no trouble reading. It’s Japanese people too, to a lesser degree. My own Japanese wife has to pause to remember how to write something every now and then.

This happens in Chinese too Grocery lists will be a mish mash of characters and pinyin https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/jiaozi.gif 鸡, get halfway through writing 蛋, forget how to do it without a computerized pinyin input, give up, scribble it out and write dan

Thanks for that example. Would a Chinese person ever write the tone in pinyin when writing something for themselves?

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#117

Post by Macha »

timr wrote: post #61
svara wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find the argument about homophones very convincing, since people do speak to each other and it works. People will surely be able to adapt. But, you're basically throwing away the country's history. In just a few years young people wouldn't be able to read any older text anymore. I can see why you wouldn't want that.

It is substantially harder and slower to read a stream of hiragana than to read a stream of hiragana and kanji. I don't know if you know anything about the language, but it's not because of homophones (though that is certainly improved) -- it's chunking. Japanese written language has the property that when you see kanji followed by one of a very small number of hiragana patterns, you know you're seeing a verb. Stemmi…

I mean, if they got rid of kanji, presumably they would introduce spaces. It's not an alien concept, it was used in early computers and early computer games, and still get used in games and books aimed at kids:

https://www.famitsu.com/images/000/190/128/y_5e083812bfff9.j...

(Pokemon also has a full kana mode, but due to the number of homonyms in Japanese, I think while it might be easier for actual Japanese children, even with the spaces it's harder for a Japanese learner than the kanji mode unless you're literally in your very first month. There's also things that will be obvious to natives but confusing to learners like that すげー in that screenshot is a slangy すごい)

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#118

Post by nojs »

nneonneo wrote: post #35

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.c…

To people who think this is surprising, it’s not that different to forgetting how to spell rare English words

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#119

Post by Macha »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #12

Perhaps if there were fewer radicals this would be less of a problem. Many thousands of characters could probably be generated from a small number of radicals.

It would make some more of the choices of radicals more arbitrary and hurt recall in other ways though

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#120

Post by TimorousBestie »

lyall wrote: post #45
timr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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 m…

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