Just trying to figure the best way forward for myself at this juncture. I am somewhat fluent in spoken Japanese, finished the Heisig 3007 some years back, and can read almost everything. But, I have one major weakness: writing in Japanese. It's not that I am unable to write the characters; thanks to Heisig, I can write all 3007 with no major problems. Because of my work and just normal life in Japan, I send emails and make documents at times in Japanese with my PC. When the kanji pop up, I usally have no trouble choosing the right ones (because I can read). But, if I want to write something by hand, I struggle because I don't remember clearly what kanji are used to make up each word I want to write. Obviously, it's because of lack of practice. Just wanting to figure out the best and most effective approach (funnest and quickest would be good as well) to become more proficient at free writing by hand. Any good ideas?

This is exactly what I stumbled upon as being the real problem to fluent written Japanese. Can't see any quick solutions myself other than actually doing written production of words you can't write from memory kana - kanji. Still for your entire vocab that'll take virtually forever... If you do something like cover the 3000 most common words then at least you can write most stuff ok I guess.

Either that or back to using mnemonics?

If you think about it right, sure it takes Japanese kids a very long time throughout their school life til they learn all the kanji but they're also handwriting it all the time which gives them years and years of writing all the different words they'll probably ever need. Even if a foreigner can circumvent the difficulty of learning kanji you're still stuck with the difficulty of remembering which kanji make up which compounds from memory.

At least that's my two cents...

I don't know if there's any easy way to do it at the point where you are, but this is exactly the reason why I've started adding vocab facts to ANKI with both recognition and production cards. I try to add "easy" words too if my deck doesn't yet have them, because if they are truly easy, they'll quickly disappear with the exponentially increasing review interval and don't really waste much time at all.

Another merit of adding each and every word I learn into my deck is being able to follow the size of my vocabulary pretty accurately. I might be just me being a statistics freak, but I find it rewarding and motivating to be able to follow my progress with concrete numbers.

You could try starting a hand-written diary. Start out with easy stuff like how the weather was & what you ate, then gradually move onto more complicated stuff.

Don't they have special kanji games on the DS or something where they test you to see whether or not you know how to write a certain kanji? You could always try that.

To be honest, though, what you are going through is actually--from what I have read--becoming not common among Japanese youth, as well. They use cell phones so much to communicate that they cannot write as many kanji as other generations of Japanese youths.

My suggestion is to take a calligraphy class.

I think everyone has this problem, but I think mnemonics are certainly not the way to go. At uni they force us to write our first drafts by hand so we get accustomed to compounds (even though ironically, everyone uses nearly all kana except for me and Chinese people). The suggestion to start easy then work your way up is the best one I can think of^^.

If you got free time, check out Lang-8.

Lots of native speakers correcting your blog. http://lang-8.com/

That Kanken 3 game on the DS should solve your problems. There's a thread here that goes into detail about it.

Since you don't have a "level", first find your upper limit such as the level where you miss 50% or more consistently, then cycle through all the lower tests to that one (For me that's level 7, so I do 10, 9, 8 then 7 on a rotating basis). Mark the questions you get wrong so you can study your weak points.

kurojohn Wrote:When the kanji pop up, I usally have no trouble choosing the right ones (because I can read). But, if I want to write something by hand, I struggle because I don't remember

Reproduction is a bitch compared to recognition.

The only way to improve it is to write more by hand and to read more handwritten notes.

My favorite example of reproduction VS recognition is money.

Sure, a lot of us know exactly what a penny is supposed to look like as opposed to the eerily similar Canadian penny, which instead of the Lincoln memorial has a leaf on the back. But what if I asked you to draw a penny?

Would you remember if Lincoln is facing left or right? How about how many pillars there or how many steps there are in the Lincoln memorial? Where does the text (the year and slogan) go?

Even though you know exactly what a penny is supposed to look like (and would perhaps even be bothered a little if the US treasury made Lincoln face the other way one day without telling anyone), without paying close attention, the details of the coin are completely overlooked.

Lang-8 wont solve your problems and KanKen DS3 is nice but it's kind of like putting a band-aid on a cut off leg.

The most solid suggestion so far is a handwritten diary (assuming you have no problems with grammar) because that would get you writing all sorts of crap by hand that if you kept up for long enough you may eventually cover most of what you'll ever need. That and hand written notes for things...

This is exactly what i was worried about. I'm pretty confident at the pace i'm going i'll be good via reading+understanding+speaking in a year or so. It's only been 5 months of SRS sentences+Grammar and 3 months of doing kanji separately. But i must say that i've made a separate deck for kana-kanji production, because i want that skill for writing as well. I guess the problem is that, if you don't train those skills from the beginning it'll become harder later on. So out of all the skills, it seems you have only writing to worry about. As everyone else suggested, i'd say do kana-kanji production via SRS software and practice dairying writing.

The "scriptorium" exercise seems like it could be useful if you want to practice your handwriting without having to produce on your own.

Actually, for some reason, scriptorium always reminds me of Mary from Pride and Prejudice:

Jane Austen Wrote:"Do you consider the forms of introduction, and the stress that is laid on them, as nonsense? I cannot quite agree with you there. What say you, Mary? for you are a young lady of deep reflection I know, and read great books, and make extracts.''

Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.

"While Mary is adjusting her ideas,'' he continued, "let us return to Mr. Bingley.''

[boldface added for emphasis]

:lol:

kurojohn Wrote:... if I want to write something by hand, I struggle because I don't remember clearly what kanji are used to make up each word I want to write.

Here's what worked/works for me. Perhaps you could do a more modern version - there's so much media available now. It depends what you need it for - focus on style and vocab that's immediately useful.

* At work, we had to submit daily hand-written status reports on each project. Typically, each project was in a different industry. At first, I would find some articles with industry-specific jargon, make kana flashcards (paper!) and practise writing the kanji. This helped immensely with written reports, but I still wasn't catching everything that was spoken in meetings. So I hired a student to record himself reading those articles and used that for dictation (jargon and expressions only). This worked well.

* A more general/comprehensive approach - and a way to maintain your ability to write individual and rarer kanji - is to have a kanji SRS deck and add vocab to the kanji card. I'm finding that just reading the compounds (only writing the target kanji) has helped me to remember which kanji occur in words.

* For a broader range of vocab than a personal diary (or just topic ideas), try to write a couple paragraphs summarizing an article or news story you've encountered that day. It's so convenient to go back and check accuracy when the vocab is already assembled.

* If it's more for personal use, I think a letter exchange could be fun. (Many people love getting real mail!) You could get feedback on your written Japanese at the same time. Maybe there's a ravishingly beautiful aspiring writer out there looking for a more private and personal penpal experience than Lang8 offers. (I see a movie here...):-)

* Sounds like you're probably already aware of this, but if you're looking to improve your writing style in Japanese, there are some great books available. Things are structured a bit differently. Good luck. :-) (too lazy to shorten this)

Looks like you made a choice, don't forget to say how it turns out.

There is one other option to add to it all: Type out your letter, then write it out by hand. This way, you solve both problems. You have the letter you want to write with correct ... er ... "spelling" (what is the term for using the wrong kanji in a sentence?). Plus, you get the pleasure of writing it out by hand. I say pleasure and not practice because it's not busy work as it's something you wanted to do in the first place. Win/win

You could listen to podcasts, tv shows, movies, news, etc., transcribe some parts by hand and use the original transcriptions to compare.

You could also use a TTS (Text To Speech) software to get audio from websites and transcribe them.