How much do you write? Do you think it's an important element to a study regime?

In my newly invigorated Japanese study, I've decided to put a strong emphasis on writing. I write down just about everything in my Anki reviews, though I don't sweat it if I skip the writing process when I'm having a busy day. (I'd rather study all that's due rather than running out of time writing and only getting to a quarter of my reviews.)

I write every day recently, mostly making up sentences for grammar practice. This year my main focus has been writing, having just cracked 3000 characters on Skritter and those reviews slowing down I moved my writing to paper with the focus on grammar this time -- simple word writing seems trivial at this point. I haven't noticed any hand cramping, not more than I'd have writing in English at least. I will say that I'm nowhere near happy with how my writing looks, but it sucks in English as well.

I recommend this series for anyone interested in cleaning up their writing. Some basic things go a long way in making a difference. I mostly struggle with proportionality.

I don't think it's very important to write unless it's a skill you want to learn, then it's obviously important to write regularly. I'm banking on Krashin's input hypothesis and I have a strong feeling that learning to read the kanji very well before learning to write is more efficient than the learning to write from the get go. It's also much more important to me to be able to read, understand, and speak Japanese than it is to be able to write, so prioritizing those skills makes more sense for my goals.

Input or hand-write?

kapalama Wrote:Input or hand-write?

I mean an actual pen between my long, creepy, gnarled fingers.

yoget909 Wrote:I don't think it's very important to write unless it's a skill you want to learn, then it's obviously important to write regularly. I'm banking on Krashin's input hypothesis and I have a strong feeling that learning to read the kanji very well before learning to write is more efficient than the learning to write from the get go. It's also much more important to me to be able to read, understand, and speak Japanese than it is to be able to write, so prioritizing those skills makes more sense for my goals.

Thanks for your thoughts. It's interesting, I don't write because I particularly want to practice writing. The main reason I do it is because it forces me to thoroughly think through the content I'm learning/reviewing.

It's sort of like this. When I'm in the shower half humming, half singing "The Boy Are Back In Town" by Thin Lizzy, I do pretty well. But if I were actually go through the song line by line, I'd only be able to recall one third of the lyrics. I think the reason for this is because I actually didn't do that that well recalling the lyrics in the shower. In reality, I just hummed some sounds, and my brain pretended that they were the lyrics, and everything was great.

When writing out my review answers, it forces my brain to engage and think about each part critically. Granted I could probably do this with romaji too, but I may as well use the extra level of context that the kanji bring to the language to my advantage.

Roketzu Wrote:I recommend this series for anyone interested in cleaning up their writing. Some basic things go a long way in making a difference. I mostly struggle with proportionality.

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Thanks for the link, I checked out some of those videos- super useful.

It bothers my thumb but I write out everything when doing RTK even if I know it.

Sometimes it seems pointless but I figure writing things down is a lot like RTK. It is something that will pay off in the long run. I could be wrong but meh.

Often in life the easier path ends up being the hard way and what looks to be the hard path ends up being the easier way.


What is really weird is that I am a lazy maternal fornicator but when it comes to the RTK I seem willing to do it the hard way.

Ok, I'll go with your analogy to illustrate my point a little better. I imagine you could learn to write out the lyrics to "The boys are back in town" much easier than to learn the lyrics to a song you've never heard. If you were to sing the song at karaoke a few times, I'm sure you would remember a lot more of the song - maybe the entire song. And that's without ever writing down the lyrics. Maybe you'd have to write out the lyrics a few times until you got it perfect, but certainly less than if you never read thought the lyrics a few times.

So my suspicion is a person who karaokes a song a few times before writing out the lyrics would learn the song faster than the same person only writing out the lyrics. And I'm guessing the same goes for learning kanji by learning to recognize them a few times before learning to write them. Of course I have zero data on this, it's just my feeling.

yogert909 Wrote:I don't think it's very important to write unless it's a skill you want to learn, then it's obviously important to write regularly. I'm banking on Krashin's input hypothesis and I have a strong feeling that learning to read the kanji very well before learning to write is more efficient than the learning to write from the get go. It's also much more important to me to be able to read, understand, and speak Japanese than it is to be able to write, so prioritizing those skills makes more sense for my goals.

I disagree. Studies have shown that kids who practice writing by hand learn the alphabet faster and more accurately than those who don't. There's no reason to think it's any different for kanji, and every reason to assume it's at least as important, if not more so, to write kanji by hand as an aid to memory.

James736 Wrote:Studies have shown that kids who practice writing by hand learn the alphabet faster and more accurately than those who don't.

Would you by any chance have a link to any of the studies or remember the name of any lead authors. Not that I'm questioning you, I'm interested in reading the paper. Thanks.

Coincidentally, I recall hearing somewhere that in some sort of recent survey, a large chunk of Japanese adults couldn't even write 鼻 correctly from memory. I guess that goes along with the whole "Spellcheck generation" deal you hear of every now and then.

Still, merely from personal experience, I find writing to be vastly more beneficial to memory than simply "looking" at Kanji.

I barely write at all, so even my kana output ability has suffered. I can only write a few kanji from memory. I plan to change this next year though, after I've taken (and passed... hopefully) the N1. I figure that's a good time to focus more on writing and speaking, and I'll need to work on vocabulary and speech patterns related to my field.

But yeah, I only recently decided that it would be nice to write better in the near future, because when I'm working with my tutor, it takes me forever to get important things noted down... and I usually have to copy what she wrote. I even forget which way さ faces regularly, and all the other kana take too long to come to mind! Strangely, with katakana, I've flipped from being able to recall all of them easily from memory except ンシツソ to being able to recall hardly any except those... Probably because I remember how to remember them so well that, even if I forget them, I can call them up immediately.

As for writing as a memory aide, it's definitely so, but it's not worth it for beginners because of the large entry cost to writing Japanese easily; I mean, learning the kana is one thing, but learning to write even 500 kanji is a lot for someone just starting. Heck, the only reason I think it's worth it for me is because I'll be using it.

RTK requires writing the Kanji, so there's that.

But seriously over prettifying them is silly too. Every kanji in about a second. Writing 重い without lifting the pen is like sex.

I never really got cramps when writing Japanese. I only ever got the cramps if I wrote too fast!

Speaking of writing in general, I say it is important. I see it as a reinforcement to reading. That's probably why my kana is so neat...but my kanji >.< let's just say they end up being different sizes and I'm often needing the kanji paper with the 4 mini squares in 1 square plus jisho.org to help me.

[EDIT] here is some free paper in PDF format https://chokochoko.wordpress.com/download/

kapalama Wrote:Writing 重い without lifting the pen is like sex.

I like sex the way I like my... ahh who am I kidding, I've never had sex. Anyway there are plenty of adults who'd like to improve their writing in their native language. I really appreciate (/envy) nice handwriting, I'm sure many others do too.

yogert909 Wrote:

James736 Wrote:Studies have shown that kids who practice writing by hand learn the alphabet faster and more accurately than those who don't.

Would you by any chance have a link to any of the studies or remember the name of any lead authors. Not that I'm questioning you, I'm interested in reading the paper. Thanks.

I had a list but I can't find them. But there have been a lot of studies recently, because schools are giving up teaching cursive and even switching primarily to typing. If you Google handwriting and learning you'll find all kinds of them.

I found a lot written on handwriting vs typing but that's different than what I'm taking about. I'm not even advocating not writing, but instead delaying writing a bit.

I thought of an anecdote: The first time I went to Japan, somebody pointed out that 駅 is the kanji for station and I recognized it every time I was looking for a train. A few months later, I was taking a Japanese class and the teacher asked if anyone knew any kanji. She asked me to write the kanji, but I told her I couldn't write it, only recognize it, but she insisted. When I tried writing it, I didn't get it perfect, but I surprised myself how close I got.

Even now, I have never practiced writing kanji, but I'm sure I could write a few from memory. Others I'm sure I could learn to write correctly with less practice than if I hadn't practiced recognition.

yogert909 Wrote:I found a lot written on handwriting vs typing but that's different than what I'm taking about. I'm not even advocating not writing, but instead delaying writing a bit.

I thought of an anecdote: The first time I went to Japan, somebody pointed out that 駅 is the kanji for station and I recognized it every time I was looking for a train. A few months later, I was taking a Japanese class and the teacher asked if anyone knew any kanji. She asked me to write the kanji, but I told her I couldn't write it, only recognize it, but she insisted. When I tried writing it, I didn't get it perfect, but I surprised myself how close I got.

Even now, I have never practiced writing kanji, but I'm sure I could write a few from memory. Others I'm sure I could learn to write correctly with less practice than if I hadn't practiced recognition.

The studies are finding that writing by hand helps with learning/memorizing the thing being studied. For instance, children who practiced writing the letters by hand remembered them better than students who didn't, and people who took notes by hand in a university classroom retained the information they were learning better than students who took notes by typing. In other words, you're better off incorporating writing kanji into your kanji memorization efforts from the start, because writing the kanji by hand will help you to remember them.

I know Heisig advises the opposite, but on this I think he's full of shit, and if your goal is to be able to write in the end, you may as well get started sooner rather than later: it's not an additional burden (it won't take a lot of additional time) to incorporate writing into your studying, and the more practice you get the better. We don't even need a study for that: all you need to do is look at the handwriting of people who are learning a writing system for the first time versus the handwriting of people who've been using it for weeks or months or years to see the difference.

James736 Wrote:it's not an additional burden (it won't take a lot of additional time) to incorporate writing into your studying, and the more practice you get the better.

Agreed about the more practice the better, but I think it would take me at least twice as long to write a kanji than it would to do a recognition review - more likely 3 to 4 times as long. And that's exactly why I think it's not as efficient.

If you read the handwriting studies you mentioned, the reason they suspect handwriting makes a difference is that people have to conceptualize and synthesize the information because handwriting takes too long to write things verbatim. But with writing kanji, the goal is to write it verbatim and there's no need for conceptualization.

yogert909 Wrote:If you read the handwriting studies you mentioned, the reason they suspect handwriting makes a difference is that people have to conceptualize and synthesize the information because handwriting takes too long to write things verbatim. But with writing kanji, the goal is to write it verbatim and there's no need for conceptualization.

For retaining information from lectures, yes. But don't forget the ones that specifically deal with written characters.

My suggestion would be to do your main studying for recognition, but to add some study time going keyword to kanji as well. I don't think it has to be a huge amount of time or that it has to cover all the kanji reviewed each day.

James736 Wrote:I know Heisig advises the opposite, but on this I think he's full of shit, and if your goal is to be able to write in the end, you may as well get started sooner rather than later: it's not an additional burden (it won't take a lot of additional time) to incorporate writing into your studying, and the more practice you get the better. We don't even need a study for that: all you need to do is look at the handwriting of people who are learning a writing system for the first time versus the handwriting of people who've been using it for weeks or months or years to see the difference.

I have two arguments against this:
- Who knows for a fact that they will want/need to write a couple thousand kanji from memory when they first start (assuming they've managed to find this forum right at the beginning of their studies and take the reading oriented approach favored here)? Sure, if they know that they'll want or need this, they can start practicing it immediately. For those of us who don't care or don't think it'll be necessary though, it's a waste of time.

- Speaking of wastes of time, any time I tried incorporating writing into my go through RTK, it slowed me down and decreased my motivation significantly. This might just be because I was never much good at drawing shapes on paper, but I highly doubt that I'm that much of an outlier. And by 'slowed me down', I'm talking about a difference between taking a couple of seconds at the most for recognition cards in Anki and spending at least half a minute writing any character with more than a few strokes.
Oh, and the literal hand cramps associated with carefully recreating multiple unfamiliar shapes.

For another anecdote, I barely did any writing practice with the kanji outside of a short stint with Kakitori-kun (I can probably only write 80 characters from memory), but I still got an immense benefit from reading through RTK and doing a recognition deck (kanji -> keyword) before really getting into vocabulary study; maybe that memory boost wasn't as good as if I had written all of those vocabulary words when I learned them, but it certainly took far less time and was easier to do.

So yes, if you have any desire to write, you should practice writing, because your desires won't be met without doing so; but if you only want to read and listen, then don't bother with writing until you decide you'd like to.

I think most people won't be able to produce any kanji from memory if they don't practise writing, but recognition is doable. So I'd choose to write or not to write depending on your goals (personally I do write kanji as I review them, and when reviewing sentences I just write the kanji I'm not that familiar with rather than the whole sentence).

James736 Wrote:I know Heisig advises the opposite, but on this I think he's full of shit, and if your goal is to be able to write in the end, you may as well get started sooner rather than later: it's not an additional burden (it won't take a lot of additional time) to incorporate writing into your studying, and the more practice you get the better. We don't even need a study for that: all you need to do is look at the handwriting of people who are learning a writing system for the first time versus the handwriting of people who've been using it for weeks or months or years to see the difference.

Wait what?

Heisig absolutely recommends writing the Kanji,
His exact words are:
Second, the repeated advice given to study the characters with pad and pencil should be taken seriously.

(That's at the basis of the system as far as I am concerned.)

Sorry for bringing up an old topic, but as I have basically the same question, there is no point to start a new one.

However, my question is not so much about the "if", but about the amount.

I only started RTK recently and going at a slow pace of 10/day. 

So far, when learning a new Kanji, I wrote it out for two full lines on my notebook, which adds to about 30-40 repetitions (I generally write small).
Unfortunately, this methode is a) time consuming, b) leads to a hurting hand (I have some problems with my ring&middlefinger making it worse) and c) decreases my motivation.

As it is important to me to learn japanese in speech and writing, I don't want to drop writing the Kanji, but I'm more looking for a better methode.

When you were doing RTK (and included writing), did you write the Kanji only 1,2 times, or did you use a high amount of repetitions? Or maybe you found some genious methode that you are willing to share?

Thanks a lot!

(2015-12-04, 11:17 am)CrayonFox Wrote: When you were doing RTK (and included writing), did you write the Kanji only 1,2 times, or did you use a high amount of repetitions? Or maybe you found some genious methode that you are willing to share?

Thanks a lot!

I wrote them out only a few times usually. I would write them as many times as took to write them correctly (mostly meaning in proper proportion, but also sometimes curved or diagonal lines would just end up at all kinds of weird wrong angles on the first try), and then 2-3 times more. I also made a point to name the keyword and each primitive (usually in my head, but aloud if I was losing focus) as I wrote.

30-40 repetitions is a lot, and I don't think it's necessary. Writing out line after line of the same character is the traditional learning style, but doing something less grindy and more effective than the traditional style is what Heisig was trying to create.

I don't believe anyone has mentioned this but what writing tools are you using? Don't dismiss this as a strange question either. Depending on how you write it can affect whether you get hand cramps or not. Do you use pencils or pens? All these things you must consider.

If you tend to have hand cramps often, I suggest you look into some ergonomic pens.I don't personally use them (I am not prone to hand cramps) but I do use pens and pencils on the heavier side so I don't have to apply so much pressure when writing. I found this allowed me to write for longer periods of time and not even come close to hand cramping