I mentioned this in passing my self-introduction thread (http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=12030). But then I realized that it's an important question, so I thought to start a new thread with the issue in the title.

When I mention the RTK method to other students I know a common objection is: "well, outside of homework in a class, you'll rarely have to write kanji by hand at all. You'll almost always have a computer or phone around to do it for you. So why bother with the RTK method at all? Why not spend the same amount of time learning vocabulary, listening, or practicing speaking with native speakers?"

I am curious what people who have completed RTK think about this. What is your answer? Why bother learning to write the kanji by hand if it is rarely required "in real life?"

My current answer - my motivation on embarking on the course - is that when I encounter vocab outside the 500 or so kanji that I already know it is slow going. But when I encounter new vocab that's kana only or based on the kanji I already know I learn it orders of magnitude faster. That's enough of a motivation for me to embark on the RTK method. In essence, to quickly gain that benefit for all joyokanji.

In short, I agree with the sentiment that learning to write all joyokanji by hand is not particularly useful in and of itself due to the prevalance of computers. But the byproduct of gaining that familiarity is still very useful.

I am very interested to hear how people who have completed the course handle this objection which my fellow students have made to my embarking on the RTK course.

Thanks.

I actually agree with you. Handwriting is not totally obsolete and depending on what you end up doing with your Japanese, you may need to write a fair amount by hand. Having a good basic knowledge of handwriting characters also helps you to learn about them more generally and to read as well. But mastering the handwriting of all the kanji in RTK 1 is more of a parlor trick than a useful skill, for most people.

(It's too bad Heisig didn't go the route of the RTH books, where the kanji are divided into two books based roughly on frequency and you have the option of doing only book 1, doing book 1 and then 2, or doing books 1 and 2 at the same time. People here have come up with the RTK Lite idea which I fully support but it's not actually integrated into the books.)

The main goal of doing RtK isn't to learn to write by hand, it's to learn to read the Kanji. The best way to do that happens to be by also writing them, to some extent.

I did RtK (and did it the way Heisig instructs the reader to do it, in his book), but haven't written since (so it's safe to assume I can't write much).

I don't see a point in learning how to write by hand. I do see a point in doing RtK, and doing it properly. It makes learning vocab afterwards much, much easier. It also makes using a computer for writing much, much easier.

Word has it that Japanese themselves are forgetting how to write kanji. I imagine it's a little biased by the japanese desire for perfectionism, but it goes to illustrate the fact that writing kanji isn't as crucial as it once was.

For me, writing helps to solidify my knowledge of the language. If I can pull a kana or kanji from memory in a second or less, then I'd say it's reasonable to assume that I know the writing system pretty well, which also translates to recognizing the character more easily when seen while reading.

Other than that, I learned how to read and write my native language in school, so that's pretty much the approach I'm mirroring with learning Japanese.

However, I think I'd only do it for Japanese. If I were to learn a third/fourth language sometime in the future, I don't think I'd bother with worrying too much about learning how to write.

Kanji is intimidating to learners. It can be a mental barrier that stops people from even thinking about learning Japanese to an advanced level as they get stuck at a few hundred kanji level.

RTK is the hack that makes learning to recognize kanji easy, and write them as a side effect. Then... you finish RTK and discover the vocab & grammar to get to an advanced are even more of a bitch, but at least you get one perceived barrier out of the way.

I agree with yudantaiteki. I completed RTK1, but in hindsight I would have done RTK Lite or just learn the kanji as I need them first. As I'm now redoing RTK for the 3rd time, I'm only adding the kanji as I need them, plus any component kanji.

When I did RTK I wrote the kanji to help me remember them. Nowadays that handwriting skill is useful for when I want to lookup a word I don't know. Mazec (android handwriting IME app) is really helpful for this & quicker than searching by kanji radicals.

I don't really need to write essays or something (heck, it's been a while since I had to handwrite something longer than a shopping list, or the occasional paper form, in English, nevermind Japanese). It doesn't matter to me though, since I know the basic rules of kanji writing I can usually write even unknown kanji well enough for Mazec to recognize them, and that's good enough for me.

There are three reasons to learn how to write kanji by hand.

First and obvious one, you might want to write notes or letters in japanese from time to time.
Second reason, some input methods require you to write kanji by hand, in particular certain electronic dictionaries.
Third and most important reason, writing the kanji stimulates muscle memory. The Heisig method works so efficiently because it makes you use different forms of memory for each kanji (minus auditive, which is why I argue that ON readings should be on the flashcards), and as long as at least one of your memories (raw, visual, auditive, chain, imaginative, muscle, etc) retains the info, you don't forget the character.

vosmiura Wrote:Kanji is intimidating to learners. It can be a mental barrier that stops people from even thinking about learning Japanese to an advanced level as they get stuck at a few hundred kanji level.

RTK is the hack that makes learning to recognize kanji easy, and write them as a side effect. Then... you finish RTK and discover the vocab & grammar to get to an advanced are even more of a bitch, but at least you get one perceived barrier out of the way.

I agree with yudantaiteki. I completed RTK1, but in hindsight I would have done RTK Lite or just learn the kanji as I need them first. As I'm now redoing RTK for the 3rd time, I'm only adding the kanji as I need them, plus any component kanji.

I competed RTK1 too and only later realized that if you can't even speak Japanese and don't have a decent sized vocabulary then learning the 2,000 odd kanji while useful, is putting the cart before the horse. Think of how much spoken Japanese you can learn in the time you spend doing RTK1. I'm now working on getting my spoken Japanese up to speed and then I'll work on learning to read in kanji/kana.

john555 Wrote:I competed RTK1 too and only later realized that if you can't even speak Japanese and don't have a decent sized vocabulary then learning the 2,000 odd kanji while useful, is putting the cart before the horse.

It's really not for people who want to read first (most people I reckon). You can't learn written vocab without kanji, which is why RTK is really useful. Not sure why anyone who wanted to learn how to speak first would start with RTK tbh.

Stansfield123 Wrote:The main goal of doing RtK isn't to learn to write by hand, it's to learn to read the Kanji.

Not according to Heisig's own introductions to RTK 1 and 2 -- although he does sometimes refer to knowing what the kanji "mean," a major goal of RTK 1 is to teach foreigners how to write all the Joyo kanji.

I would say "to recognize" more than "to read"... like chinese people does, they already recognize kanji in japanese words but they can not read them... for me one of the benefits of RtK is this, but yes you also have a keyword which gives a general meaning so you have an added benefit. Just imho!

For me I practised how to write all the radicals before during/learning how to write kanji.

Anyways I found learning how to write the radicals (both by themselves and in kanji) helped me to recognize and distinguish the different Kanji.

I would say writing helped me

I paraphrase OPs original question as "If you are interested in Learning to read and converse in Japanese but not interested in writing kanji, is it more efficient to skip the handwriting part?" If that is the question, personally I suspect skipping the handwriting of kanji you will learn everything else, including reading kanji, a bit faster than if you included handwriting in the mix.

This isn't to say that handwriting doesn't make it easier to remember the kanji, because I believe it does. However, I also believe the added time required for handwriting isn't compensated by an equal time savings in enhanced recognition.

I will probably not have much use for it, but I still spend a lot of time to keep my handwriting skills fresh. It just feels extremely lame to me not being able to write, that's all really.

For all the smartphones, for all the computers, for all of the supposed technological advances of Japan...

You'd be amazed just how often I'm given a piece of paper and a pen and asked to write something down. Yeah, the kanji I'm writing now are limited in number, nowhere close to the 2,000, but even with my poor Japanese I'm still writing the buggers just about every day outside of practice.

yogert909 Wrote:I paraphrase OPs original question as "If you are interested in Learning to read and converse in Japanese but not interested in writing kanji, is it more efficient to skip the handwriting part?" If that is the question, personally I suspect skipping the handwriting of kanji you will learn everything else, including reading kanji, a bit faster than if you included handwriting in the mix.

This isn't to say that handwriting doesn't make it easier to remember the kanji, because I believe it does. However, I also believe the added time required for handwriting isn't compensated by an equal time savings in enhanced recognition.

How about we meet in the middle, and settle for writing down the difficult Kanji a few times, but not the easy ones.

Deal.

A lot of good operational perspectives here. One thing that informs my perspective on whether it's worth practicing writing came from Trick!, the j-dorama, where one piece of evidence for the "brilliant" physicist professor being brilliant is that he has excellent kanji skill, reading and writing. From that and other allusions, I get the impression that if you're a good student, if you're well-educated, if you're urbane and cultured, you have good kanji writing skills. And thanks to the reciprocity of the halo effect, I wonder if someone lacking good kanji writing skills is perceived as having been a bad student, poorly educated, loutish... can anyone speak to the validity of this hypothesis? Of course, this hypothesis speaks to what Japanese think of other Japanese's writing skills. Does anyone have any insights into how Japanese treat, or what they think of, a foreigner who can speak good Japanese but can't write well, versus one who can speak well and write well?

Personally, writing kanji is the most fun thing I've learned to do in several years, and I use every opportunity to write (pen-paper, handwriting recognition, etc.). I also feel that writing nicely complements the passion for reading kanji that I think I share with most Western learners of Japanese/Chinese. So I was very glad to read:

JusenkyoGuide Wrote:For all the smartphones, for all the computers, for all of the supposed technological advances of Japan... You'd be amazed just how often I'm given a piece of paper and a pen and asked to write something down. Yeah, the kanji I'm writing now are limited in number, nowhere close to the 2,000, but even with my poor Japanese I'm still writing the buggers just about every day outside of practice.

<dances with joy>

---

Something indirectly related I wanted to comment on:

yogert909 Wrote:Word has it that Japanese themselves are forgetting how to write kanji. I imagine it's a little biased by the japanese desire for perfectionism, but it goes to illustrate the fact that writing kanji isn't as crucial as it once was.

First, I'm surprised nobody mentioned (or is it taboo) this nugget buried in Khatz's polemic You Don’t Have A Foreign Language Problem, You Have An Adult Literacy Problem:

Quote:over the past several months, I have challenged many of my Japanese acquaintances to little kanji tournaments. They have been able to write everything I have thrown them. The only way I have “won” is by lobbing ridiculously curvy curve balls (like “闖入”); the equivalent in English would be asking someone to spell and define “floccinaucinihilipilification”; of course you would “win” but for what? Also, every once in a while, on the news here in Japan, they show people talk about how “them young ‘uns nowadays with their computeys ain’t writin’ their kanjis no mar”. Wanna know why that’s on the news? Because it’s newsworthy. Most people are absolutely fine reading and writing their kanji.

(A lot of juicy kanji factoids there, buried in the endless screed.)

Also, I am a big fan of Victor Mair's writings on Chinese literature and history, the Victor Mair who wrote the post linked by yogert909, but I recently discovered his totally anti-Heisig stance on learning Japanese/Chinese, see, e.g., How to learn Chinese and Japanese where he says "If I were the czar or god of Chinese and Japanese language pedagogy, I would not teach students a single Chinese character until they were relatively fluent — about two years."

I'm willing to suspend judgment on which approach is better, Heisig vs Mair, in light of the large numbers of students both sensei have taught, but a comment Mair made in yogert909's linked post helped me understand his view:

Victor Mair Wrote:the sequence of strokes required to produce hanzi / kanji / hanja ... is so heavily dependent upon brute memorization and extraordinarily complex neuromuscular coordination.

If you treat kanji as "brute memorization" and essentially muscle memory, then I can see why it would make sense to approach them only after you had a good command of the spoken language. But the core of Heisig's approach are the sound psychological principles that visual memory is much more capable than abstract memory, and that given an appropriate memory system, there are no obvious limits on memory (see the Major method and the method of loci, two of a number of schemes covered in psychology professor and memorist Ken Higbee's Your Memory, last edition from 2001).

Given that superior memory systems like RTK are not used in Japan or China or by most of the world's Japanese/Chinese language courses, it's hard to apply traditional insights on practicing writing to op's original question, "is it worth spending time to learn to write." Hence the value of these operationally-validated approaches given in this thread.

ariariari Wrote:I mentioned this in passing my self-introduction thread (http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=12030). But then I realized that it's an important question, so I thought to start a new thread with the issue in the title.

When I mention the RTK method to other students I know a common objection is: "well, outside of homework in a class, you'll rarely have to write kanji by hand at all. You'll almost always have a computer or phone around to do it for you. So why bother with the RTK method at all? Why not spend the same amount of time learning vocabulary, listening, or practicing speaking with native speakers?"

I am curious what people who have completed RTK think about this. What is your answer? Why bother learning to write the kanji by hand if it is rarely required "in real life?"

My current answer - my motivation on embarking on the course - is that when I encounter vocab outside the 500 or so kanji that I already know it is slow going. But when I encounter new vocab that's kana only or based on the kanji I already know I learn it orders of magnitude faster. That's enough of a motivation for me to embark on the RTK method. In essence, to quickly gain that benefit for all joyokanji.

In short, I agree with the sentiment that learning to write all joyokanji by hand is not particularly useful in and of itself due to the prevalance of computers. But the byproduct of gaining that familiarity is still very useful.

I am very interested to hear how people who have completed the course handle this objection which my fellow students have made to my embarking on the RTK course.

Thanks.

For me, if you can't write a kanji, then you really don't know the kanji.
You're just fudging it. In many cases, fudging does work because there might
not be any other kanji that looks similar enough to confuse people. For some people, that is good enough and I'm ok with that.

Also, knowing how to write a kanji makes your really awesome.
I've had times when I had to correct native Japanese people. I told
them that they wrote a kanji incorrectly, but they almost never believe me.

They would gave me this "what the heck does a gaijin know about my language? How dare they try to correct me? There's no way I'm wrong because I'm a native and know better" look.

Then I pull out a dictionary and prove to them them I'm right.
Suddenly their jaws drop. They are both amazed and ashamed for doubting me.

chamcham Wrote:For me, if you can't write a kanji, then you really don't know the kanji.

I agree COMPLETELY.

john555 Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:For me, if you can't write a kanji, then you really don't know the kanji.

I agree COMPLETELY.

That's subjective semantics. It's like saying you don't have any tools if you don't have a torque wrench or you haven't been to tokyo until stayed out all night in kabukicho.

Learning to write Kanji flawlessly is a skill I wish I had and it is usefull, but it also takes a hell of a lot of time. For some people it is worth the time investment, for others they may find other things to impress people at parties.

My Japanese professor stated a few times that if you don't know stroke order, people will think you're lazy, or that you don't take your Japanese studies seriously. But on exams, we were never ever tested on stroke order - just if the kanji was written correctly or not.
It depends on the person and circumstances, I think. If you're not living in Japan, it's basically about as useful as a parlor trick. (Unless you just like writing it, then it has personal value.) Not to mention, learning to correctly scribe individual kanji is one thing, but remembering the correct one in a compound is a different issue. And then multiply that tens of thousands of times for an adequate vocabulary, and your progress is just way too slow, IMO.

aldebrn Wrote:A lot of good operational perspectives here. One thing that informs my perspective on whether it's worth practicing writing came from Trick!, the j-dorama, where one piece of evidence for the "brilliant" physicist professor being brilliant is that he has excellent kanji skill, reading and writing. From that and other allusions, I get the impression that if you're a good student, if you're well-educated, if you're urbane and cultured, you have good kanji writing skills. And thanks to the reciprocity of the halo effect, I wonder if someone lacking good kanji writing skills is perceived as having been a bad student, poorly educated, loutish... can anyone speak to the validity of this hypothesis? Of course, this hypothesis speaks to what Japanese think of other Japanese's writing skills.

And they're right to think that. If someone wasn't able to learn how to write the right way after going through 12-16 years of schooling, that says a lot about them.

None of that applies to foreigners. If someone learned to speak and read my native tongue, I'd be very impressed with them. And the Japanese, from everything I've seen, are also very impressed with foreigners who can even just speak Japanese, let alone read it.

chamcham Wrote:For me, if you can't write a kanji, then you really don't know the kanji.
You're just fudging it. In many cases, fudging does work because there might
not be any other kanji that looks similar enough to confuse people. For some people, that is good enough and I'm ok with that.

Also, knowing how to write a kanji makes your really awesome.
I've had times when I had to correct native Japanese people. I told
them that they wrote a kanji incorrectly, but they almost never believe me.

They would gave me this "what the heck does a gaijin know about my language? How dare they try to correct me? There's no way I'm wrong because I'm a native and know better" look.

Then I pull out a dictionary and prove to them them I'm right.
Suddenly their jaws drop. They are both amazed and ashamed for doubting me.

You shouldn't live your life for the purpose of impressing others. And even if you do, you should take up juggling instead of Kanji writing. It's easier, more impressive to most people, and it gives you a workout.

yogert909 Wrote:

john555 Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:For me, if you can't write a kanji, then you really don't know the kanji.

I agree COMPLETELY.

That's subjective semantics. It's like saying you don't have any tools if you don't have a torque wrench or you haven't been to tokyo until stayed out all night in kabukicho.

Learning to write Kanji flawlessly is a skill I wish I had and it is usefull, but it also takes a hell of a lot of time. For some people it is worth the time investment, for others they may find other things to impress people at parties.

I'm just saying that if you can't write a kanji, your ability to correctly recognize it is
dubious at best. In some cases, you're lucky because there are no other similar looking kanji. In that case, you can get away with vaguely remembering parts of the kanji because nothing else looks like it. But if you came across a similar kanji in a compound (which if correct would be an entirely different word), you run the risk of translating the wrong word.

It doesn't take a lot of time to write kanji after you've finished RTK.
Your own stories literally write out the kanji for you :-)

But not everyone has to write flawlessly.
Everyone has their own priorities. That's ok.