Tag Archives: write kanji

How to Write Kanji—a free kanji tutor (for people who don’t write kanji)

Kanji, Power Tools, ,

how-to-write-kanjiKanji Recognizer as a self-teaching tool

How to write kanji is a question that Cure Dolly would precede with another question, namely whether to write kanji. As a matter of fact, I am largely of her school. Like Cure Dolly, I hand-write maybe two dozen words a year in English. So why do I want to learn to do in Japanese what I don’t even do in English?

The arguments over whether you need to learn how to write kanji in order to learn kanji at all are discussed by Cure Dolly, and I am broadly in agreement. It depends on who you are, what your needs are, and how you learn best.

But let’s say you are like Cure Dolly (and I am). Let’s say you don’t need to write kanji (for exams or whatever) and you only need to recognize them for purposes of both reading and (electronically) writing. Is there any need to learn to write them at all?

I really don’t see any value in sitting down to write kanji hundreds of times. I have heard people complain about doing this and still finding the kanji to be strangers to them in a week or so.

I actually am learning a tiny bit to write kanji, but none of them are strangers to me. I know the kanji. I am familiar with their components. That isn’t the point of writing them to me. So what is it?

One thing I have realized is that while my recognition is reasonably good, my ability to picture shapes is (perhaps abnormally) terrible. I can read hiragana with no problem, but I recently realized that I could no longer write several of them. I did learn them in the beginning and could write them easily. I found that a year or so later, even though I had no trouble at all recognizing them and reading them, I don’t actually remember how they are made up. I can’t picture them in my head. I only know them when I see them.

I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Personally I don’t want to lose my ability to hand-write kana, so I did a little practice with a kana-writing app just to get it back. If I wrote anything by hand—shopping lists, anything—I would do it in Japanese just to keep my hand in. But I don’t. I am a near-total non-writer.

However, kana is not the point here. The point is kanji. What I have found there is similar. Since I didn’t know how to write kanji, I didn’t really know how they were made up. I didn’t really know the difference between 家 and 象, for example. I tended to recognize them by context rather than their actual differences. I don’t think learning to write kanji is the only way to overcome this problem. One could just familiarize oneself more firmly with the components of each and make up little stories around them, which is how I learned them in the first place.

One of my problems with writing is a pathological fear of paper. I really can’t manage the stuff. If you start allowing it into the house it gets everywhere—but you can never find the bit you want. I really can’t start toodling around with bits of paper. For me it would open the door to nameless chaos.

But I did start to feel it would be worthwhile to write kanji. Not hundreds of times—just a few times each. Not in order to learn them—the kanji I write I already know by sight—but simply in order to clarify my mind on their exact composition.

And it works. But you really need the right tool. Fortunately I found it. It is called Kanji Recognizer. It is an Android app. You can write the kanji with a stylus on your tablet or keitai. Although this is not the purpose of the software, what it does is both allow you to write kanji (without all that scary paper) and act as an instant tutor at the same time.

Let me show you how:

how-to-write-kanji-1

You write the kanji freely, and as you can see, Kanji Recognizer tries to work out what you wrote and places its top ten guesses along the top. The higher you come in the top ten, the more accurately you have written the kanji. This in itself is very, very useful.

The software also numbers your strokes, so you are able to check your stroke order. It puts the number at the start of each stroke so you can also check the stroke direction (this comes into its own later as you will see).

The two buttons ringed in mizuiro (pale blue—I don’t know why there isn’t an English word for the “pink” of blue, but there isn’t) are 画削除 kakusakujo (delete stroke) and クリア (clear). 画削除 is very nice as it allows you to get rid of strokes you messed up. Paper is just mean about that sort of thing.

The app is free, though ad-supported. If you have your device in Japanese (and you should) the ads will tend to be Japanese too, as you can see at the bottom of the screenshots.

Once you have written your kanji, you can tap the correct one at the top to get a screen of information about it:

how-to-write-kani-2This, of course, is immediately useful for making sure the kanji is what you thought it was! The most important thing here for our purpose is the button we have ringed: 書き順 kakijun (writing order—or stroke order, as they tend to say in English). This gives you, as you might expect, an image of the kanji (written with an enviably steady hand) with its correct stroke order marked:

how-to-write-kanji-3

However, the really useful thing here is the (ringed) button labeled 動画 douga (animation). Press this and the app will clear the kanji and re-draw it for you, so you can watch it forming stroke by stroke and see how it is done.

You can then click the home button (ringed) which will take you back to the page where you wrote the kanji originally. It will still be there, just as you wrote it, so you can check whether you had the stroke order and direction right. If you didn’t make number one in the top ten, you can hit クリア and try again.

If you have an idea of the general rules for stroke order, you will get it right a lot of the time. The surprises will tend to impress themselves on your mind. The animation is particularly useful for this, I find. What you will also start to find instinctively is a lot of kanji-order sub-rules. They aren’t taught and rightly so, as they are fiddly and have exceptions, but they do start to make a kind of sense in practice, I find.

I am still not really trying to learn how to write kanji. I know hand-writing is never going to be a part of my real life. Actually, I would like to learn Japanese calligraphy one day, but that is something of another matter. What I am finding is that this gives me a better feeling for how the kanji work, how they hang together.

My method is perhaps unusual. I have never in my life “learned a kanji”. I learn words as I go along, and I make friends with the kanji that form them. People have occasionally asked “how many kanji do you know?”. I have no idea how to answer. How would I know? Maybe some people go through a book from Kanji 0001 to Kanji 2500, but I really wouldn’t even know how to do that, and I am sure it wouldn’t stick that way.

When I write kanji on my little slate, I am already friends with those kanji. I have known them for some time. Now I am taking tea with them and learning their funny little ways. I am a horribly inattentive friend, and there are so many things about them I never noticed. I love them so I want to learn.

If you love something, you should pet it. Kanji recognizer was essentially made to be a dictionary, not a tutor. It works as a tutor, and (for me at least) as something else too. It is my favorite Virtual Pet game!

Do you need to write kanji?

How-to, Kanji,

is-it-necessary-to-write-kanjiIs it necessary to be able to write kanji? I mean, actually write it with one of those marky-sticks on the flat white stuff?

The conventional wisdom is that you have to write out each kanji by hand hundreds of times in order to actually learn them. Some people claim that with the proliferation of digital devices this is no longer necessary, while others say that without writing them you will never learn them. Which is true?

Let me start by saying that there is no way around knowing the kanji. If you don’t know them, you can neither read nor write them, even with digital devices. Actually reading them is more possible with things like Rikaichan, but your reading will be very slow and painful. Rikaichan is a good aid when needed, but it is no substitute for learning the kanji.

Writing will be next to impossible since while any decent digital device will automatically make the kanji for you, you have to know which kanji you mean. You can type K+I to get き, but did you mean 木 ,気 or 器?

The question is, can you know them without the physical act of writing them? There are arguments on both sides but let’s sum up the situation.

Writing kanji is not a magical key to knowing them. Some people complain about writing out kanji hundreds of times and still forgetting them quite quickly.

The old way of learning them, practised by Japanese schools and, following them, most Western teachers of Japanese, is simply to write them without analyzing them – pure rote- and muscle-memory. In my mind there is no doubt that this is a very bad way to learn kanji.

Also while Japanese children may not explicitly learn the parts of kanji and how they fit together, they are aware of radicals (you can’t use a kanji dictionary without being) and I cannot imagine that they are actually blind to the beauty, logic and poetry that goes into the structure of kanji.

Whether you are writing kanji by hand or not, you really must learn to identify their component radicals. Not doing so is like trying to learn the shapes of words without noticing their component letters (actually we do read both romaji words and kanji like this when we are very familiar with them, but whenever there is any uncertainty – and all the time during the learning process – we need to be able to identify the parts or we are making the job far more difficult than it needs to be).

One problem of not learning to write kanji is that you may never be fully aware of their exact structure. Confession time. Even kanji I know very well I could not, in many cases reproduce exactly. Not just because I haven’t practised writing them, but because I don’t know exactly how they look. I know them when I see them.

How bad is that? In practical terms, not very bad. Because the only time I need to know them is when I see them. I either see them in reading, or I see them on a list of possible kanji when I am typing them.

One objection to this is as follows: “Some kanji are very similar. If you only know them on a ‘facial recognition’ basis, you won’t be able to tell them apart”.

This is very true, and it is a serious objection if you are going to be taking Japanese language exams, where you will often be presented with out-of-context similar kanji side by side and asked which is which.

In real life, however, that does not happen. In real life you are either reading or writing. You have context. Even if you can’t tell the two kanji apart when you see them side by side, you actually know that “I kissed my ___” is more likely to be “mother” than “Andromeda galaxy” (no, those two things don’t actually have similar kanji. Just funnin’).

In cases where similar-looking kanji do mean similar or confusable things, the non-writing learner has to look at them together and clarify in her mind what distinguishes them. But she does not need to know the exact formation of every kanji she is familiar with – or even the confusable minority. She just needs to know enough to tell them apart in practice.

“But – you won’t be able to write. With a pen.” No, you won’t. How far is that a problem?

It depends how much you actually do write. Personally, I would say I write – actually by hand – in English maybe 200 words in a year. Truthfully I can’t even see how it would amount to 200, but I am being cautious. Other people write a lot more of course. So that depends on you.

“What about writing your name and things”. Silly. Of course you will be able to write your name. I am not suggesting anyone should not be able to write kana (though I confess that I write them so little I am a bit hesitant). You will write your name in katakana usually. If you do by some chance have kanji for your name, of course you will learn to write those kanji. If you have a Japanese address you will very likely want to learn to write the kanji for that. This is not some “never write a kanji under any circumstances” game.

Some people are “tactile learners” and writing may really be the right way for them. However I suspect a lot of the people who say “you can’t know them without learning to write them by hand” are somewhat (and understandably) protective of the countless hours they themselves have invested in doing it.

If you are taking written exams you have to learn to write kanji.  If you are taking exams with tricky kanji-recognition elements, the best way of learning kanji that exactly may well be to learn to write them with the correct stroke-order. If you are a tactile learner, writing may be the right path for you.

If your main use of kanji is real-life usage (whether running a company or reading manga), you probably don’t need to write them. You do need to know them.

I find that knowing and making friends with kanji is vital to seeing how Japanese words fit together and why they mean what they mean. I love kanji. I gaze at them in admiration. I love the fact that the kanji of 枯れる (kareru, to wilt or wither) is “tree” plus “old”. I adore fun things like the fact that 望遠鏡 (telescope) means hope/view+distant+mirror – actually the mirror can, I think, be a speculum or seer’s crystal which makes it all the more mysterious and lovely.

But even with regular words I am very often thinking of them in terms of their kanji. “あぁ, 審査　ー　審判の審、調査の査ですね。”

But I blush to say I don’t write them. I only blush a little though. I don’t write English either.

How to learn kanji organically as part of Japanese self-immersion→