LazyNomad wrote:

"There is no need to be able to write by hand all the kanji," the council said in a report it submitted to education minister Tatsuo Kawabata.

Well, that should save us all some time and effort :-)

It's pretty much entirely a factor of the frequency of the character.  纏 is a relatively uncommon character, and the word まとめる is often written in hiragana, so many Japanese people don't know how to write it.  It has nothing to do with the *shape* being hard to write, it's just the commonness.  (Of course there's a perception that a dense character like that might be harder to write, but Japanese people don't have any trouble with common high-stroke-count characters like 驚, and there are plenty of low-stroke-count characters that people wouldn't know how to write due to their infrequency.)

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 June 08, 7:28 am)

What!! Monme is one of my favorites, along with 我, I love the way you move around when you write them... Plus, I have the top rated story for monme! I can't believe they're booting it out of the pantheon...

Well, I've only seen it used in a children's song. Wait, that was just the word and not the kanji.

yudantaiteki wrote:

It's pretty much entirely a factor of the frequency of the character.  纏 is a relatively uncommon character, and the word まとめる is often written in hiragana, so many Japanese people don't know how to write it.  It has nothing to do with the *shape* being hard to write, it's just the commonness.  (Of course there's a perception that a dense character like that might be harder to write, but Japanese people don't have any trouble with common high-stroke-count characters like 驚, and there are plenty of low-stroke-count characters that people wouldn't know how to write due to their infrequency.)

Funny that you mention 纏.

I just came across that character for the first time today.
It's on the first page (はじめに) in a book called 篠笛教本.

I was surprised to find out that 纏めてwas まとめて when I looked it up.

Another weird character on that page was from the author's
name. The character is pronounced ひろい and has the same meaning
as 広い.

There are 4 different characters for the ひろい and they have the same meaning. Is there any difference between them?
広い
弘い
廣い  (this is the kanji used in the author's name)
宏い

Last edited by chamcham (2010 June 08, 12:21 pm)

More kanji the better? To be honest, I'm sure people know that, you already need to  know more than joyo kanji to be fluent.

I've been noticing that, the ratio of kanji that I don't know is going down a lot. I only see a few that I may not know of now. But when I see it in context, I can understand it fully but by itself, i'm like "huh have i seen that before?". Wonder if this has happened to other people as well.