I’ve never learned to write Chinese characters because nowadays everyone types on their phone or computer. I only focus on learning to recognize characters so I can read. Currently, I know around 1,000 characters, and I can read, but very slowly. Should I just keep reading more, or is it worth spending time learning to write? Maybe it would help me recognize characters faster…
Writing is not really needed unless you are in the country that it’s being used. Learning to text is pretty useful though.
Reading more will help this issue
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I don’t think reading and writing kanji are closely related.
I am a native Japanese speaker, but there are many kanji that I can read but cannot write. Even if I can’t write them, I can still recognize them instantly.
It’s like recognizing a familiar face at a glance, it doesn’t mean you can draw them.
That said, studying the basic components of kanji, including stroke direction and stroke order, can help you better understand subtle differences in shape across different fonts.
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Just my own thoughts from learning Japanese and Mandarin before that:
- You’ll never be close to “fluent” (for lack of a better word) in a language if you can never express yourself writing by hand. Even if it’s not practically required for you, philosophically at least, learning how to write completes your knowledge of the language and makes you more well-rounded as a learner. Imagine meeting someone who is ESL and can converse in English and type in English but can’t even write his name or a full sentence by hand using a pen.
- There are times when it’s necessary to use it. Even just as a tourist, in Japan, being able to write is useful for simple things like putting your name down while waiting for a table in a crowded restaurant.
- You can learn to read without learning to write, but learning to write will speed up your reading comprehension because you have the muscle memory of writing the characters and perhaps some memory devices you’ve used to recall what radicals form the character. You’ll have a much deeper familiarity with the characters, which will in turn increase the speed at which your brain converts a character from an unknown symbol to something with meaning.
- Pick up Heisig’s Remembering the Hanzi. You could learn to write 2,000-3,000 characters in a year if you commit yourself to it. I’ve used his books for both Chinese and Japanese and they are incredibly helpful if you follow it properly (and maybe use flashcards with it).
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I sometimes like to copy down what I am reading on LingQ by hand, as a sort of meditative handwriting practice. A few observations:
- It’s easy to lose track of the meaning of what you’re writing down if you focus more on the writing than the understanding. This is, of course, all the more of an issue in languages with a different script: it’s a lot easier for me to lose track of understanding Russian than, say, Spanish, or Swedish because the latter are in Latin script, which is more closely connected to sound as well as meaning in my subconscious than anything else. It’s easier to lose track in Persian than Russian, because Cyrillic script is still much closer to what I grew up with than Arabic script. And finally, it’s much easier still to lose track of meaning in Chinese than Persian, because the script is even further removed from what I intuitively associate with meaning.
- Writing by hand is much, much slower than reading (duh!). You’re also forced to pay attention to detail if you’re going to reproduce those details. This means that when I do focus on the meaning of what I’m writing, I’m more likely to notice details I’d been glossing over, such as the exact spelling of a word. Often this is where I will realize that I’ve been conflating two similarly written (or pronounced) words, and which one is which.
- The last point is applicable to Chinese in particular: when just reading, my mind focuses on the overall impression of the character without focusing on particular components. When writing by hand, I pay attention to what component is where in the character (and even: how to write it attracticely). Thus, it’s often when I write by hand that I will notice some subtle (or not so subtle!) aspect of different characters that I had been glossing over before - that helps me recognize it with more confidence the next time it comes up in reading, too! That said, the number of characters is too high to have this kind of “aha” experience for every new one. I usually will remember the detailed writing and meaning of no more than a handful of characters per hand-copying session.
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Not the OP, but I’ll be looking for this. My wife and I lived in Taiwan for a couple of years back in the late 1980s, and I’m trying to claw back my hard-won Mandarin from 35+ years ago. Thanks.
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I watched this video a few days ago, and it might interest you.
It says, “younger Chinese folk are able to spell out the pronunciations of word, but are forgetting how to actually write the character by hand”
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