I used to know how to write in Japanese

https://aethermug.com/posts/i-used-to-know-how-to-write-in-japanese

by mrcgnc • 11 months ago

227 272 11 months ago

aethermug.com

4ensic• 11 months ago

3 years of Japanese in high school and I can still read hiragana 48 years later.

adastra22• 11 months ago

This isn’t about the kana though.

Philpax• 11 months ago

They're joking that despite their three years of study, they've only retained hiragana.

prokopton• 11 months ago

I have no trouble reading but writing kanji has become a problem. I never need to do it and I can’t remember how to write kanji I have no trouble reading.

It’s Japanese people too, to a lesser degree. My own Japanese wife has to pause to remember how to write something every now and then.

dmoy2• 11 months ago

This happens in Chinese too

Grocery lists will be a mish mash of characters and pinyin

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/jiaozi.gif

鸡, get halfway through writing 蛋, forget how to do it without a computerized pinyin input, give up, scribble it out and write dan

bloak2• 11 months ago

Thanks for that example. Would a Chinese person ever write the tone in pinyin when writing something for themselves?

gramie• 11 months ago

This was happening to people I knew when I lived in Japan 30 years ago. Many people were using wa-puro (word processors that let you type in the phonetic form and choose from the appropriate kanji). I imagine the effect is far more common now.

I remember one time when a university engineering professor couldn't remember how to write the kanji for "police". He didn't seem embarrassed asking someone else. I don't know if they still do, but they would often demonstrate by writing out the character with their index finger like a pen in the other hand's palm.

ti42o34j234234• 11 months ago

This is probably why Japan still adamantly emphasizes writing.

Written resumes/ fax machines ... remain the norm, and while this may seem anachronistic for the rest of the world (pretty much all of which uses either (semi-) phonetic scripts derived from Aramaic or from Brahmi), it makes sense after you come across the Chinese characters.

pezezin• 11 months ago

No, it's because Japan is a deeply conservative country, really adverse to change, because change means taking risks. If you ever had to deal with Japanese you would know, layers upon layers of convoluted procedures for no real reason.

But hey, at least now I can get the "my number card" to get my hanko certificate from the convenience store. Maybe in 30 years I will be able to use the card directly to prove my ID without needing the stupid hanko!

tdeck• 11 months ago

A similar thing happens with all kinds of iconography, from flags to logos. People can easily recognize many logos, but when asked to draw them they often can't come very close.

https://magazine.adler.co.uk/promotional-idea/we-asked-100-p...

vintermann• 11 months ago

Not just logos, but also shapes of everyday objects. Bikes, famously.

mock-possum• 11 months ago

That’s a fun little article, thanks for sharing that.

optiot• 11 months ago

Is ワープロ馬鹿 really a term used by native Japanese speakers? As far as I can tell it only really shows up in Japanese->English dictionaries and English forums (see https://www.google.com/search?q="ワープロ馬鹿"+-a+-the).

edit: s/word/term

syncsynchalt• 11 months ago

Is ワープロ馬鹿 really a word used by native Japanese speakers?

You probably mean idiom. ワープロ (word processor) and 馬鹿 (baka: idiot) are individually both words used by Japanese speakers. Japanese speakers would be more likely to say 漢字健忘 (kanji amnesia) to refer to the phenomenon though.

vehemenz• 11 months ago

I enjoyed this read, but I am noticing that people who claim to have aphantasia seem to write about themselves and their experiences an awful lot. I doubt the phenomenon is real.

Some people doubt that sun-sneezing is real, so I can entertain the possibility of being wrong. But sun-sneezing is trivial to demonstrate to doubters, and it doesn’t confer any “I’m special points.” No one would pretend to have it, unlike aphantasia.

ehnto2• 11 months ago

I would find it more surprising if the brain did not have quirky versions like this, given how complex it is and given how often our genes are not perfectly copied.

HeatrayEnjoyer• 11 months ago

Given the amount of literature on the matter, what durable evidence is there that it actually doesn't exist?

roxolotl• 11 months ago

This reminds me of one time I mentioned to someone I had aphantasia and their response was “how do you spell!?” Seems wild to me that some people see words in their head to spell them but I guess at least one person does. I do wonder if that means they’d have better kanji recall for writing.

sixothree2• 11 months ago

It’s real. I didn’t know it was a thing until a few years ago then suddenly everything made sense.

I’m glad people are talking about it.

apt-apt-apt-apt3• 11 months ago

What is aphantasia, specifically?

I don't consider myself to have aphantasia. If I close my eyes and try to 'see' with my eyes the letter 'm' or an apple, all I see is the back of my eyelids– pitch black.

If I then try to 'see' with my mind the letter 'm', I can imagine the shape and drawing the shape, but it never appears in a physically visual manner. I can trace its lines with my eyeballs, but try as I may to hallucinate an image, it's still only pitch black always. The closest I come to seeing it is being very confident that I know exactly what 'm' looks like, and that I could take that mental model and draw it exactly on paper immediately.

Do some people have such a clear and strong mental image that they can effectively inspect, zoom in and manipulate a mental image as well as a real visual image, and that's considered not-aphantasia?

lyall2• 11 months ago

When learning Japanese, I purposely chose to _not_ learn how to write any of it by hand. As the author notes, writing (by hand) is in fact a separate skill from reading. So I decided I would not invest my limited time, motivation, or brain space to writing.

Overall it's been a successful approach, and I recommend it to new learners unless they have a particular interest in being able to write by hand or they feel strongly that writing the characters helps them remember them.

It's only rarely that I have to write anything other than my own name in Japanese. I've practiced my address but writing it in English is fine in 99% of situations. Being able to write properly would save a little embarrassment, but I still believe my language learning time would have a much higher ROI in other areas.

dodos• 11 months ago

The one thing I noticed when I was focusing on learning to write is that it helped me a lot with differentiating between similar characters when reading. I forget which ones now, but there are many characters that differ by a single radical and have similar meanings, knowing how to write each one helped me quite a bit there, but overall I rarely write anything other than my name and address now that I live in Japan.

jwrallie• 11 months ago

Even if you cannot recall and have to type in your phone first (as natives do often for unusual ones), at least you can write it much faster because you are not just copying.

I think it’s useful to do RTK with SSR and, once you finishes, you only need about 15 min of maintenance per day to keep it in memory.

xdfgh11122• 11 months ago

I can confirm this. I passed N1 without learning to write. I later learned how to write all of the kanji, and all it does it help you distinguish very similar kanji without context. I tried learning all the compound words (i.e. which kanji to use for every word) but gave up a few thousand Anki cards in. It was time consuming and impractical. (Wanted to pass Kanken 2) Props for anyone who put in the work though.

pessimizer• 11 months ago

Don't drill words drill sentences (no Japanese word means an English word, and no English word means a Japanese word.) And don't fall in love with any of the sentences, move on to new sentences. Eventually the knowledge accumulates, but only through volume and variety.

timr7• 11 months ago

I went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you, I almost completely abandoned it as soon as I didn't have to take language school tests anymore.

It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards.

As a partial aside, the Heisig anecdote that leads off this piece is painful:

Japanese children learn the spoken language first, then they learn how to write it in elementary school; Chinese students of Japanese (who tend to be pretty good at it) have pre-existing knowledge of character meanings and forms from their mother tongue, so they only have to learn how to pronounce them. Therefore, a Western learner should first focus only on the meaning and writing of those couple of thousand common characters and, only after having mastered those, should move on to studying the pronunciations.

Going from "Japanese people learn the spoken language first" to "you should spend a big chunk of time learning characters before learning sounds, words or grammar" is a pretty remarkable mental backflip.

The author says he spent eleven months doing this before devoting any time to the spoken language. If I could put the "head exploding" emoji here, I would do it. I spent only slightly more time than that at language school, and came out conversational.

lyall2• 11 months ago

Yeah I agree. I way over-indexed on learning kanji (via WaniKani) at the beginning of my Japanese learning journey. I got about halfway through before realizing it was silly that I could read 健忘症 but didn't know many very basic hiragana-only words. It wasn't timed wasted but it probably wasn't the most efficient approach.

In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then move on to kanji later. But writing is a very useful tool in learning, and having access to that tool can help speed things up.

Like most things in life, a balanced approach is probably the right one. But you have to know what your goal is. Our brains are lazy, they only get better at what we make them get better at. If your goal is to just read kanji, practice reading kanji. If your goal is to understand and speak the language, practice listening to and speaking the language. But if you want to have a balanced language ability, you'll need to practice it all.

pm2154• 11 months ago

Yes, I agree that trying to learn kanji upfront is a silly idea.

Heisig says in the introduction to RTK I that he learned 1900 characters "before the month was out". If like him you can do the whole set in a month and then have no further need of formal review or study beyond using them as they turn up, then I can see it not being a terrible idea. But as far as I can tell, almost nobody has a mind that works like Heisig's does: people seem to need longer and to rely more on review via an SRS like Anki.

Personally I found my problem with RTK was that I successfully memorised "English keyword to write the character" for 2000 kanji, but this was not at all linked to my actual use of the language, so I still had the problem I started with of "I want to write the word べんきょう but can't bring to mind the kanji for it", because I had no association between Japanese words and the English keywords for their component kanji...

thaumasiotes15• 11 months ago

Well, I can say that I've spent more than eleven months learning common characters before learning any Japanese sounds, words, or grammar.

But the reason for that is that I was learning Chinese. I spent zero effort on learning any characters preliminary to that. There is no reason you'd need or want character knowledge.

My character knowledge is decent now, because eventually my learning method became "talk with Chinese people over Wechat", and if you do that you will necessarily learn common characters.

raincole• 11 months ago

The idea that one should learn kanji first just to start learning Japanese is utterly nonsense. The author has Stockholm syndrome.

If one's mother tongue isn't Chinese/Japanese, I guarantee you that's impossible to understand kanji/hanzi as deeply as a native speaker does just by spending 17 months on memorizing how to write them. It simply never happens. Languages come first and writing systems come later no matter which target language you're trying to acquire.

Even native speakers get confused about their own writing systems. It's vs its. Should've vs should of. Doppelganger vs doppleganger. Being able to wield the writing system like a wordmaster is a big plus and a praiseworthy effort. But it really isn't the essence of language acquisition.

jimbokun2• 11 months ago

The time to grind Kanji is when you're ready to really push the breadth of your vocabulary.

While you're still picking up grammar it makes more sense to just pick up kanji here and there as you encounter them.

anigbrowl8• 11 months ago

Indeed. I thought the Heisig approach was garbage on the same basis. I did get a kanji reference book that was a bit more focused on learning the Joyo kanji (ie the 2000 or so you need to graduate high school or pass N1) but I did not stick with it because it also used mnemonics as a learning tool and I found them distracting and obnoxious (in the sense that the author kept injecting his personality into them - sorry dude, I came here to learn kanji, not to learn your opinions on things).

In general I just do not get the mnemonic approach. It's literally another layer of stuff to recall that frequently doesn't have anything to do with the meaning, and the book I had even connected mnemonics in simpler characters to build into more complex ones. Worst of all, you're learning to identify characters with a bunch of word association in English.

Instead of treating chinese characters as a bunch of "tangled squiggles" that you have to memorize or make up stories about you could just ...learn the radicals (called bushi in Japanese). There are around 230 of them, and they are fundamentally pictographic, so the meaning and appearance are linked. Every kanji character is either a radical itself or made up of other radicals, like a word spelled in two dimensions. Some are used much more than others so most of the time you'll be combining the same 32 simple ones. Once you get familiar with them kanji become much easier to remember; a character that is made up of 10 strokes like 勉 is actually made up of just 4 parts which are just a few strokes each. In some cases you can even guess the meaning of a kanji character you've never seen before by looking at the components, but even where you can't, being able to see a complex character as just a collection of familiar simpler chunks makes everything way easier.

You can find a kanji radicals deck on Ankiweb and it's small enough to do alongside your vocabulary or listening practice without being a burden. It will induce a little cognitive dissonance because a few very familiar characters have different meanings in their radical form but you will get over that soon enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_freq... is a great reference, both for the frequency and the simpler table of stroke count. The individual radical pages have additional detail tracing each one back to bone script (the oldest system of writing, etching characters on bones) which make the pictorial evolution very clear.

By the way, a book I do recommend is the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary by Jack Halperin. This too uses its own schema for looking things up, but it's a simple one, based on the shape (left-right/ top/bottom/ nested/ freestanding) and the number of strokes, which makes looking things up fast. It also contains indexes to look up kanji by radical or pronunciation (eg if you have the furigana) so you are not locked into one way of understanding them like mnemonics. It also has common vocabulary that uses the kanji, stroke order, and all that good stuff. And it has a good reference on the rules of stroke order. There are only 8 of them and (like radicals) once you understand the underlying principle you can look at a new kanji you've never seen before and have a pretty good idea of how to write it. You should still check while you're learning, but the more you write the easier it gets.

jisho.org is also incredibly useful, because you can dig into any word to find the kanji within, and then dig into individual kanji to see which radicals they're composed of, as well as looking things up by radical.

alisonatwork• 11 months ago

Yeah I made the same decision learning Chinese. It's just not worth the extra time and effort relative to the utility.

Occasionally I still have to sign my name, so I specifically picked a name that a) was written the same in both simplified and traditional and b) had a low number of strokes. Like you, the only time this has bitten me is in hospitals and banks where occasionally they ask you to do stuff like write out your address. I sometimes exercise my dumb foreigner privilege and ask the clerk to help, but since addresses have a formal romanization method it's often fine to write that, and I've seen enough locals struggle I don't feel too bad about it.

simianparrot• 11 months ago

I am doing both because while learning to write the symbol for a sound/meaning and identifying the symbol’s sound/meaning are separate skills, they enhance the fluidity of _thinking_ in Japanese significantly for me. It has a synergistic effect and to me seems to improve the brain’s understanding and efficiency in compressing the knowledge.

But my goal is not just to read and understand but to talk conversationally. While Japanese is very different from my other languages, I’m already multilingual (Norwegian, English, Dutch and German) and this approach has always worked best for me.

cosmic_cheese• 11 months ago

I might have to play with writing alongside vocab reviews.

Back in the earlier days of the online Japanese learning sphere (when AJATT was still the big new thing), I tried learning by starting with writing by studying kanji independently, but that went nowhere even after several months in.

More recently I’ve been making a point of audibly speaking the sentences associated with vocab cards and that’s helped a lot with being able to fluidly speak the various long trains of sounds that are common in Japanese but rare in English as well for improving recall and improving reading speed. It would follow that writing might enhance that effect.

My foremost goal is to become conversational too. The rest should follow more naturally if I can achieve that.

hintymad10• 11 months ago

You strategy makes sense. Truth be told, even native Chinese and Japanese tend to forget how to write many characters as they spend more time typing than writing.

creakingstairs• 11 months ago

I’ve taken your approach as well but I did notice that I retain Kanjis that I learn to write significantly more than ones I can just read. But memorising all the Kanjis is a bother.

I found the sweet spot to be writing on a scratch pad as I go through Anki. And not particularly worry about getting writing right too much. Sometimes I’d be confused in my head but my muscle memory would kick in and automatically write the kanji!

thaumasiotes15• 11 months ago

It's only rarely that I have to write anything other than my own name in Japanese.

I thought they had stamps for that.

idahoduncan• 11 months ago

I'm following this approach. One of the most interesting things so far has been observing just how separate recall and production are. There are kanji that I can recognise instantly, and recall meanings and pronunciations, but I can't visualise them at all.

zdc1• 11 months ago

I'm learning traditional Chinese and found that writing helps me recognise the components and strokes when reading the same characters.

If I just try and visually pattern match with flash cards, anything that's hand written or in an stylised font will throw me off. If I can sympathise with / recognise the stokes used, I find it easier to tell what character they're trying to show.

goosedragons• 11 months ago

It is a separate skill from reading, but I think it's still useful.

At the very least learn the strokes of common radicals. In my experience things like denshi jishos can be VERY picky about how you input them. It makes word lookup much faster IMO anyways.

BrtByte5• 11 months ago

I think your advice makes a lot of sense for most learners: prioritize the skills you'll actually use, and don't feel guilty about skipping handwriting unless it personally matters to you

solidsnack9000• 11 months ago

Perhaps if there were fewer radicals this would be less of a problem. Many thousands of characters could probably be generated from a small number of radicals.

Macha6• 11 months ago

It would make some more of the choices of radicals more arbitrary and hurt recall in other ways though

anigbrowl8• 11 months ago

32 radicals are enough for ~75% of characters though. My biggest problem with writing is that I default to writing fairly small so if I have to do a character with more than 12-15 strokes it's either way too big or hard to read later.

larsiusprime• 11 months ago

If native speakers are starting to have character amnesia too, does that suggest in the long run you would expect the writing systems to simplify towards the phonetic syllabaries? Or is the fact that we have computers as a mediating tool going to forestall that and just make things weird?

aarroyoc• 11 months ago

I'm just a Chinese student from the West so take it as just my two cents but I don't think it will evolve to phonetic syllabaries. Chinese has a lot of homophones so it's useful while reading to have an extra semantic meaning. They also say that once you're used to it, you read faster but at my level I can't confirm it. So with modern input devices you're basically simplifying the hard part of the characters, which is writing, and keeping the reading part where they're better than pure phonetic systems.

Macha6• 11 months ago

IMEs have actually caused the opposite a little in Japanese, because you type the phonetic pronounciation and get a list of possible kanji, then with computer use "writing" kanji really means "recognising" and so people will use kanji that they never would have bothered with remembering how to handwrite.

timr7• 11 months ago

Being able to read but not write Kanji is so common that it's a meme amongst Japanese people -- to the point where it's a game. For example, here you can watch some Japanese television people play a game where they compete to write words in 10 seconds or less:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQQqLno9hw

I (and every other learner) have the same problem. It's not special, and has nothing to do with aphantasia.

sovietswag• 11 months ago

Hm, the author explicitly pointed out the same:

What confuses me is that other people can form images in their minds. Are all those with character amnesia also aphantasic? That can't be, given that aphantasics amount to less than 5% of the population, while a much larger number of people forget how to write (70% of teenage participants in a Chinese TV show were unable to write the word "toad"!).

They were discussing their aphantasia as a precursor to other very interesting points, e.g. about how "seeing" a character in your mind isn't enough to be able to draw it, --> verbatim traces and gist traces.

anigbrowl8• 11 months ago

Completely off topic but that is the shakiest camera work I have ever seen, and I learned to shoot before gimbals were cheap and easily available. For that matter, it's been easy to automatically correct that sort of thin in post for years now. How were they not embarrassed to upload something so unwatchable?

wrp• 11 months ago

In other words, what feels like a single, monolithic "literacy" ability is actually two distinct skills, each exercised in different instances and each capable of improving and decaying on its own.

This dissociation has been used to test theories of hemispheric specialization. A good overview is in Neurolinguistic Aspects of the Japanese Writing System by Michel Piradis (1985).

wintercarver• 11 months ago

Nice post! Enjoy your blog's overall aesthetic too. Perhaps correlation in sense of style, though, as I also used RTK to learn to write Kanji, loved it, and now, ~15 years after that escapade, am kind of in a similar bucket (can write some characters, but mostly just read). I still think RTK great overall method and would do it again!

Also, shoutout to Fabrice, creator of Kanji Koohii -- that was my first foray into SRS back in ~2007/2008, after which I found Anki (pre-mobile).

ehnto2• 11 months ago

Very interesting, definitely the first step towards writing a character for me is picturing it in my head. If it's particularly challenging I might, still in my head, project it onto the page and that seems to give my brain the spatial data to begin translating it to real world movements with the pen.

But even still I also can barely write maybe 5% of the kanji I can read. As well words are often made of multiple kanji, but if you showed me the kanji separately I don't always recognise them as part of a word I do know. Recalling a kanji into my minds eye doesn't seem to be part of the skillset of reading, maybe just a by-product of long term repeat exposure.

bapak3• 11 months ago

A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it.

So time to sunset the system, surely? I don't know why so many countries are so obstinately hanging onto something so difficult.

Do it like Korea if you don't want to go the Vietnamese way.

kusokurae2• 11 months ago

long reply here bc this is a Special Interest of mine.

I'm going to put aside the "so difficult" thing here mostly, because the perceived difficulty is partly modern teaching practices not updating beyond "just write the kanji 100000 times ok" (this is a failure of people, not the writing system), and people actively choosing to not write anything at all, which isn't necessarily a problem because nowadays recognition is more important, and I don't see people panicing about how many people don't know how to spell many english words anymore.

Alternatives would be nightmarish and culturally destructive to implement in the modern day. Further, people confuse poor implementation with complexity being the cause of the problem. Taiwan and HK both have high literacy rates despite using traditional characters, yet simplified characters were apparently necessary to increase literacy? It doesn't compute.

Just under 50% of Japanese words are loanwords from Chinese. Recognising characters allows a ton of written nuance and extra vocabulary which the Japanese take full advantage of. There's at least 10 separate words for "kou kai". Even when not fully-remembered, Kanji allow mental mapping of multiple homophones without issue.

We're really talking about a vocabulary mass exctinction event. Back in the ancient times Korea didn't have such a wide-ranging and culturally-mixed set of words as now. If the Japanese do this it'll be cutting off the vast majority of their cultural history. Seems unideal considering the butchering the French did, did exactly that to Vietnam's literary culture and basically cut the people off from much of it.

Chinese doing this would be insane. Mao was tempted to use roman characters instead of the simplification they rolled out, which from a system design perspective only made a worse and more difficult/confusing system with more exceptions to rules than before, and poorer phonosemantic consistency/relations with other characters. Further because as research has proven many times over, it's harder to recognise many excessively simple & similar characters compared to more unique and specific forms. Thankfully Stalin advised him against it.

We really are talking about doing something similar to a total spelling reform of english and just throwing the last 1000 years of literature, written records etc away. Only in the case of especially Chinese, you're throwing away a system that was developed and specifically tailored to the languages using it, which have due to its relative robustness to change as compared with latin letters, led to writing surviving many many difficult periods, regime changes, wars, famines etc over 3000 years.

If you've ever compared Beowulf with Gawain, with Shakespeare and then modern English, you'll understand what a total overhaul a language can undergo if unchecked -- Chinese characters have enabled a comparatively stable orthography. Less than 800 years and it becomes gibberish.

bapak3• 11 months ago

many people don't know how to spell many english words anymore.

Yes but that's not really comparable.

You can misspell "litrally" but how close can you get if you can't remember any stroke of the glyph? There's an inherent advantage in spelling words closely to how they sound.

I'm not saying English is great at this either, but I can still write "Kernel Sanders" and you know what it means, without using a whole other writing system as fallback (pinyin)

jack1243star• 11 months ago

A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it.

They definitely do, it's just that hand writing has become a more niche use case in modern society (regardless of the language).

If you removed all kanji in a block of Japanese text (replaced with kana), I'd expect at least a 50% reduction in reading speed for natives, and some errors in comprehension. They're fundamental to the language.

latentsea6• 11 months ago

You wouldn't expect the same 50% reduction if the natives had been educated under that paradigm and suitable adjustments made to the system like adding spaces etc to accommodate it.

hintymad10• 11 months ago

Are you sure? If anything, spelling along makes it hard to read Chinese or Japanese. Examples: can Japanese people correctly understand this: “かんじをせんねんいじょうつかっていたけいいからかんじをはいしするとぶんしょうによるいしのそつうにへいがいがしょうじるからです”？ In fact, the following two different sentences both have the same above kana：

「監事を専念異常浸かっていた敬意から監事を配しする飛ぶん商による石の疎通に兵が意を招じる空です。」

「漢字を千年以上使っていた経緯から漢字を廃止すると文章による意思の疎通に弊害が生じるからです。

Or how about くさくさくさくらくらくさくさくさくさくさくさくらさくさんさくさんくさくさくらんくらくら？

Or how about こうないしゃせい？Is it 校内写生 or 口内射精?

In all seriousness, even Koreans still debate whether they should continue to use some Chinese characters, and they do so in poems and literatures. For instance, 악유원 means shit, yet 乐游原 has layers of meanings. Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean. Unlike Chinese, where individual characters correspond closely to morphemes and carry distinct meanings, Japanese is organized around words as the fundamental linguistic units. Furthermore, because Japanese employs a pitch-accent system rather than the kind of lexical tones found in Chinese, writing some native Japanese words (和語) entirely in kana typically does not create confusion.

Also, Japan had at least three major attempts to remove Kanji. First time: The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel, was written by a woman entirely in kana, with only a small number of Buddhist terms in kanji—terms which, in theory, could also have been rendered in katakana. This demonstrated that early Japanese could be expressed systematically and fully without using any Chinese characters at all. Nevertheless, the Japanese chose to retain kanji.

Second time: During the Meiji Restoration, slogans such as “Abolish kanji, or East Asia will never grow strong” were popular. In the end, Japan found that it could modernize, prosper, and even become one of the five permanent members of the League of Nations while still keeping kanji. The decision was made to continue using them.

Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese.

svara2• 11 months ago

I don't find the argument about homophones very convincing, since people do speak to each other and it works. People will surely be able to adapt.

But, you're basically throwing away the country's history. In just a few years young people wouldn't be able to read any older text anymore. I can see why you wouldn't want that.

astrobe_2• 11 months ago

You can't possibly count the third time as a real attempt. A language reform initiated by a foreigner and recent enemy at war, who burned your cities and even nuked two of them? If someone knows about successful examples, I'd be curious to hear about them.

mastermage5• 11 months ago

I dont know who amongst the Koreans argues for the use of Chinese Characters. The vast majority of Koreans don't know even the small amount of Characters they still use. Even simple ones.

latentsea6• 11 months ago

Or how about こうないしゃせい？Is it 校内写生 or 口内射精?

It could be 校内射精.

zahlman2• 11 months ago

That first example is amazing; where does it come from?

coffeeling19• 11 months ago

You didn't even try to do it the way Koreans did it, though. When Koreans dropped hanja in favour of a hangeul-only script, they adopted spacing because spaced text is much easier to understand than unspaced text. Likewise, products like old Japanese videogames which couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations used spaced kana because it's just much better and no one's masochistic enough to not use them if they don't have access to kanji. The Japanese mixed script doesn't use spaces largely because kanji already serve as word dividers. If you remove that function, everyone sane will use spaces, and pro-kanji arguers will leave them out to make the proposition seem mad.

Importantly, spaces also make it much easier to recognize the shapes of the words.

It's the chief reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from. No one actually reads these English posts by vocalizing letter by letter to slowly build the words together.

Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy.

Meme sentences designed to be hard to read that you'd never see in real life aren't an actual point. By that token, the Buffalo buffalo sentence argues for the urgent adoption of kanji in English.

Likewise, in my native Finnish:

  - Kokko, kokoo koko kokko kokoon.
  - Koko kokkoko?
  - Koko kokko.

ie.

  - Kokko, assemble the bonfire.
  - The entire bonfire? 
  - The entire bonfire

It's perfectly readable despite the meme value.

Similarily, "kuusi palaa" can mean:

  kuusi palaa = the spruce is on fire
  kuusi palaa = the spruce returns
  kuusi palaa = the number six is on fire
  kuusi palaa = the number six returns
  kuusi palaa = six (of them, or six pieces of something) are on fire
  kuusi palaa = six (as above) return
  kuusi palaa = your moon is on fire
  kuusi palaa = your moon returns
  kuusi palaa = six pieces

Do we need to urgently adopt kanji in order to avoid homophony?

  > Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean.

Curiously, it's possible to write books entirely in pinyin: https://pinyin.info/readings/pinyin_riji_duanwen.html

Similarily, I highly doubt people would've printed the Roumaji Zasshi if they believed it to be incomprehensible: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...

  > Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese.

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this. There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system. This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.

otabdeveloper42• 11 months ago

How many Americans can write cursive?

I think it's time to abandon the Latin alphabet. It's too inefficient.

mastermage5• 11 months ago

Is cursive a requirement to write the English language correctly?

codedokode4• 11 months ago

That reads as a foreigner suggesting to abandon many thousands years long history and culture just because the characters are too difficult for him.

It doesn't even make sense because today we have computers and ML. If you want to write something, you just type the spelling, and the program automatically converts it into proper characters. And if you don't understand the character, AI can translate it for you. I am sure this can be integrated into electronic glasses.

coffeeling19• 11 months ago

Japan has had pro-romanization societies since the 1920's, and even during the last attempt at large-scale script reform after the war, it wasn't just the Americans pushing it: Many Japanese were enthusiastic about moving to a phonetic script because they perceived it as more efficient and modern. Likewise, not every American administrator was in favour of reforming away the kanji, far from it.

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan is a good treatise on the subject.

EDIT: Also, this was published in 1877 if I did my date conversions right: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...

bapak3• 11 months ago

I gave you an example: they can't write it.

I also gave you two examples of cultures who already did it: Koreans did it autonomously, the Vietnamese did it during occupation. Both are successful today.

But yes "preserve history" at the expensive of daily life. I'm sure you speak Latin too, plenty of history lost there.

anigbrowl8• 11 months ago

This is a common misconception until you study the language seriously. Japanese nominally has only 50 sounds, known as mora. In practice there are more because people smush them together, but this tends to be for very common words or dialectical variations by region. There are also spoken pitch markers, but they don't have any written indicia.

Because there is such a small number of basic sounds, homophony (words with the same pronunciation but different meanings) is absolutely rampant. This is not too big of a problem when speaking because the context is usually obvious, but writing anything abstract using phonetic script alone will quickly become problematic. It's also tedious to read long texts in phonetic script in the same way that it's tedious to read lots of upper case text in the Latin alphabet.

Another language feature is that Japanese compound words are often formed by just taking 1 or 2 more from several longer words. This would be like shortening 'American-Russian diplomacy' to 'amru diplomacy'. Very clear when written with specific characters, confusing if it is just phonetic. Then, word pronunciation changes within compounds, eg 川 kawa means river, but 山川 yamagawa is mountain river, and these changes are ubiquitous, probably 95% of words go through this phonetic alteration when folded into another word.

It gets more complex again because there are so many particles, words that indicate grammatical inflection of some kind and can drastically change the meaning of a sentence if you use the wrong one. The most common ones are just a single mora and most others are just two. But there are lots of particles. 10-15 essential ones, ~30 that are used all the time, ~65 you need to know for fluency, and more that 150 you might come across in written form.

I could go on and on. The basic reason for all this is that Japanese is fundamentally different from other languages because it developed on islands, and because the weather patterns around those islands made sailing in and out more difficult than islands in calmer latitudes separated by greater distances. They adopted Chinese characters because they didn't have a written language at the time they encountered them, then adapted those characters to develop the phonetic scripts. There's a huge amount of technical debt that would be impossible to unravel.

Do it like Korea

Korean has more different sounds, eg 14 consonant and 10 vowel sounds, vs ~10 consonant sounds and 5 vowel sounds in Japanese. You could also argue there was a higher level of literacy over a longer period, but that requires a lot of history and geography explanation to support - the point being that it would have been much harder to impose by imperial fiat unless it had been done much earlier.

BrtByte5• 11 months ago

But at the same time, language and script are deeply tied to culture, identity, and history, so it's not as easy as just flipping a switch

nneonneo• 11 months ago

This is very common in Chinese now. The older generation, many of whom didn’t learn pinyin, just use voice input to send messages; the younger generations just use pinyin input and similarly can’t handwrite beyond the simplest characters.

The phenomenon of forgetting how to write is called 提笔忘字 (tíbǐwàngzì - to pick up the pen and forget the character). It was previously covered here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41959256

tgv• 11 months ago

That is a very melancholic name.

nojs2• 11 months ago

To people who think this is surprising, it’s not that different to forgetting how to spell rare English words

bananalychee• 11 months ago

Not really. Even in English there are only a few possible ways to spell out a given sound. With Chinese characters that mostly goes out the window, making speaking and writing more or less orthogonal skills. Not entirely since there are classes of characters that are related by sound, but to a much greater extent than alphabetic languages. Personally if I forget a spelling in English or a related language I realize that my approximation looks wrong and can correct it by elimination, whereas with Chinese characters it's common for people to simply not have a clue how to even write the first stroke of a word they've heard and read before.

thaumasiotes15• 11 months ago

the younger generations just use pinyin input and similarly can’t handwrite beyond the simplest characters

In my experience people often use input methods that aren't pinyin. I tend not to be able to type on other people's phones.

insane_dreamer• 11 months ago

Writing out Chinese characters definitely helped me learn to read them as well (not surprising, since engaging multiple senses helps one retain information better), even though in practice I never had opportunity to write them out because I always used either a phone or computer.

Unlike the author, I found most of the mnemonics as much trouble to learn as the characters themselves, and soon stopped using that approach. It just didn't work for me.

theoa• 11 months ago

This is also why I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought. Most of what you remember is nothing like an approximate copy of the things you experienced in real life—even in the specific case of text, memory is not even remotely like a paraphrase of previously read words. Many of our thoughts happen in a highly abstracted and distilled form, interacting and connecting with each other as a network that simply cannot be faithfully converted into a sequence of words, however long.

Perhaps the most interesting quote in an interesting article.

Leaves me speechless or something

vunderba3• 11 months ago

I spent years in Taiwan studying traditional Chinese and even at the height of my proficiency there were plenty of rarer logographs that I'd frequently stumble over - only able to draw "blurry approximations" of them depending on my familiarity.

Coming from a phonetic language with only 26 letters, it was such a surreal feeling being able to effortlessly read a character but be unable to reproduce it.

djtango• 11 months ago

My understanding (which may have been in the previous HN discussion on the topic) is that Chinese people just substitute with a homophone if they're really stuck and native readers can guess by context what the writer meant. Much like fudged spelling like when Americans mix up do and due

BrtByte5• 11 months ago

Also wild how quickly the writing ability fades without regular use

vunderba3• 11 months ago

From the article:

On the surface, this atypical trait seems to explain quite well why I can draw a blank when asked to write the kanji for "plant" (植) from memory. I don't see the character in my mind, so it makes sense that I can't reproduce it on paper.

While the author's aphantasia may have posed some recall issues - it wouldn't explain why they had ever been able to reproduce 植. Kanji has the concept of radicals AND stroke order. One could make the case that perhaps the author's motor cortex is simply storing the equivalent of LOGO programming language instructions for reproducing the logograph.

Take away your mind's ability to find and chunk (木, 十, 具) by showing them "radical"-less characters and I'm sure it would be even more difficult.

vidarh• 11 months ago

As someone with aphantasia, I'm also not convinced that is the cause. I can draw better than average from memory, and used to be quite good but haven't practiced for many years.

There are also animators and artists with aphantasia[1].

My spatial recollection is particularly good - I can sketch out precise diagrammatic drawings from memory much better than I can do artistic drawings.

So while it's not impossible that not having aphantasia would've been a benefit to him, I don't think there's much evidence that it's has any big effect on the ability to draw - something that also fits Ed Catmull's experience on surveying his old employees in the article mentioned.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256

Klonoar• 11 months ago

My wife has aphantasia, is fluent in Japanese, and writes the language better than many of our friends who still live there. She was just forced to learn the stroke order, etc when learning the language.

Aphantasia causes many odd issues for her but the ability to write complex languages or draw are not one of them.

dionian• 11 months ago

Writing characters without knowing the radicals is kind of like spelling without really clearly understanding the alphabet. The stroke order is easy to remember, the radicals make the full characters easier to remember.

hintymad10• 11 months ago

What drove me crazy when I started to learn Japanese was that a Kanji characters can have so many different pronunciations. The most egregious example is 煙草, whose pronunciation is the really just tabacco(tabako, or タバコ). I knew the etymologies and the historical context on why Japanese evolved like that, but it's nonetheless hard for me to remember all the pronunciations, at least initially.

Also, I find that knowing Kanji is essential in appreciating part of Japanese culture. Take their addresses, for example: Kinukawa is really meaningless, but 鬼怒川 is such a amazing name. Similarly, Akihabara means little if all we know is the pronunciation, yet its Kanji 秋叶原 is such a beautiful and poetic name that invokes complex emotions.

happa• 11 months ago

It's Kinugawa, and Akihabara is written as 秋葉原.

hintymad10• 11 months ago

Yeah, I mixed up my input and chose simplified Chinese

GaggiX• 11 months ago

That's why I focus on learning words rather than individual kanji characters. Kanji characters have so many different readings, and the Japanese language is full of exceptions that it's not worth the time unless you're passionate about it, eventually you will pick up the readings of most common ones and you will be able to guess new words automatically, writing them no thank you, I barely write in my own language without a keyboard.

BlarfMcFlarf• 11 months ago

I tried this, but I couldn’t really tell the differences between even quite obvious characters until I sat down with them individually.

PrimeDirective• 11 months ago

"I still do. But I used to, too." -Mitch Hedberg

setay11• 11 months ago

A favorite joke of mine with a similar structure was Dave Attell's

"I used to do drugs waaaay baaaack - there!" And he points to the side of the stage.

bloak2• 11 months ago

If you're doing an exam in China or Japan, do you write on paper, or use a computer?

gyomu2• 11 months ago

In Japan, paper

aikinai3• 11 months ago

Almost always paper. The people who forget are adults who don't write anything by hand anymore except the occasional form or sticky note.

klausa3• 11 months ago

Not the question you asked; but something that actually surprised me, as someone who has taken multiple language tests in the EU:

The (semi-official) Japanese language tests do not test language production in _any_ way, even on the highest levels.

You don't need to speak a single word, nor write a single character to pass the exam, it's all single-choice answers.

AFAICT, the equivalent exams for Chinese and Koreans do include writing, at least on the higher levels; but still don't have a speaking portion.

mastermage5• 11 months ago

I have recently had the experience of Labguage School in Japan and they also realy heavily lean into having just circle the correct parts or do somethign like insert correct Particle here.

While I have tremendous respect for the Japanese Language and people. The Japanese in all my exposure to it do not know how ot tech languages. Be it their own to people that do not know it or English to their own people.

TheDong2• 11 months ago

The (semi-official) Japanese language tests do not test language production in _any_ way, even on the highest levels.

This is simply not true. The Kanji Kentei is probably the most popular Japanese language test Japanese people might take outside of school, and it tests writing heavily.

If you're talking about the JLPT, that's a test meant only for non-native speakers.

all single-choice answers.

Not even multiple choices? Maybe they should reconsider that one.

gaoryrt• 11 months ago

In China, paper

gyomu2• 11 months ago

When I reached upper level Japanese classes (N2/N1), my native Japanese teachers would regularly (maybe once a week or so) have to look up a character they were writing on the board during class.

It definitely made me feel better.

boxedsound• 11 months ago

I have experienced this for simplified Chinese. I studied some Chinese while studying computer science in China. The classes would have us learn writing, reading, speaking and listening (sensibly so for a Chinese language class).

Being able to write characters was handy whenever I came across documents that needed to be filled, but since leaving China I never had the need to write characters again. I now just input them using pinyin on keyboards, and I can easily recognise and read / input the correct characters. It is a strange feeling trying to write the characters I once knew, but now have forgotten, yet being able to read them instantly...

I would like to recommend dong-chinese, a language app I came across when I prepared for my stay over there. It taught things in a very efficient manner.

At this point I would like to recreationally increase my vocabulary so I have started working on a game called LingoRogue. My goal is to make it addictive to play, with a sneaky vocabulary-increasing effect. In other words a game that is "learnified" rather than a learning software that is gamified.

BrtByte5• 11 months ago

It's like the muscle memory for writing just evaporates, even though the recognition part stays perfectly intact

BrenBarn2• 11 months ago

I mean, this is not a politically correct statement, but I think one line of reasoning from this is to say that Chinese characters (which is what kanji are) are not a great way to write down language for practical purposes. A friend of mine in grad school irreverently referred to the Chinese writing system as "a really huge, really inefficient syllabary", and I think there's some truth to that. The characters no doubt have a certain beauty and their history is interesting, but a system where the meanings and pronunciations have to be learned totally separately seems to be inherently cumbersome in some ways. Even in a language like English which abuses the Latin alphabet in a notoriously messy manner, the amount of phonetic information that can be gleaned from the written form is fairly high, which gives two paths to the word (via memorized whole-word recognition or incremental sounding-out).

aikinai3• 11 months ago

It also affects the learning curve. English-speaking children can read far more advanced books earlier than equivalently educated Japanese.

They probably don't outweigh the disadvantages, but there are some small benefits. Once fluent, I think I remember Japanese to be slightly faster to read because of the more unique shapes. And you can make more flexible and elegant graphic text designs and tables (like in Excel) given the compact words and natural vertical writing.

numpad08• 11 months ago

Is that so? Deducing definition of an unknown kanji word isn't that difficult. I never had issues with "advanced kanji" as far back as I can recall.

jansan• 11 months ago

Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system.

Long time ago I studied Japanese in Japan. On the way back to my home country I was sitting next to a bunch of Chinese people on the plane who did not speak any English or Japanese, but we were able to have a small conversation using Kanji/Chinese characters, because the characters' meanings are usually the same, although the languages are quite different. If the people would have been Greek and could not speak any English, no conversation would have been possible at all.

Another thing to mention is the radical system. Many Chinese characters consist of two or more characters, of which one is the "radical". This often helps you understand the broad meaning of the character in case you do not know it. For example, the Japanese character for fish is "魚". If you know that character and see another unknown character that used "fish" as a radical (for example "鮭"), you know that the character probably describes some kind of fish (in this case salmon). So it is not simply a huge list of "syllables".

gwd3• 11 months ago

Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system.

I mean yeah, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. But consider this: We could do the same thing in English as in Japanese -- replace loads of letters with Chinese characters: Write "跑ing" instead of "running", and so on. The French and German and Russians and Spanish could all do the same thing with their languages; and then when traveling, people could at a basic level read the signs and menus, and communicate at a basic level by writing, without having to know anything about the language.

Would you choose, post-facto, to add Chinese characters to English?

For my part, I'd say "no way". English orthography is already hard enough for my son to learn, without having to add characters on top of it.

ETA: Just for kicks, I asked Claude to try its hand at writing the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice in this manner:

It is a 真理 universally 認知ed, that a 単一男 in 所有 of a good 財産 must be in 欲 of a 妻.

However 少知n the 感情s or 見解s of such a 男 may be on his 最初入ing a 近所, this 真理 is so 好固定ed in the 心s of the 周囲家族s, that he is 考慮ed as the 正当財産 of some 一 or 他 of their 娘s.

"My 親愛 Mr. Bennet," 言ed his 夫人 to him 一日, "have you 聞ed that Netherfield Park is 貸 at 最後?"

Mr. Bennet 返答ed that he had 不.

"But it is," 戻ed she; "for Mrs. Long has 丁度 been here, and she 告ed me 全 about it."

Mr. Bennet 作 no 答.

"Do 不 you 欲 to 知 who has 取n it?" 叫ed his 妻, 不耐. "You 欲 to 告 me, and I have no 反対 to 聞ing it."

qingcharles• 11 months ago

I know almost nothing of Chinese languages, but some Japanese, and when I see boxes and instructions for some random item from Temu that is all in Chinese I'm amused by being able to understand bits of it.

I saw a face mask box that was all in Chinese and had 非医 on it (which means non-medical) which, depending on your font would be written exactly the same in Japanese: 非医.

Barrin92• 11 months ago

have to be learned totally separately seems to be inherently cumbersome in some ways.

It also has quite big advantages. Because writing systems tend to be highly standardized meaning of most characters has changed relatively little, so Chinese people can read ancient texts with aid of a bit of classical Chinese. And this also works across space, China has a lot of mutually unintelligible spoken dialects but pretty much everyone can understand the meaning of written Chinese. And so can even Japanese or Korean people.

In contrast spoken language tends to change so quickly that phonetic writing systems can rapidly become completely unintelligible. Old English is practically a foreign language. Probably nobody understands that "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum" means "Hey! We the Spear Danes, in years gone by".

BrenBarn2• 11 months ago

The problem with these advantages is that most actual uses of words depend on some amount of context, and only a relatively small set of word+context combinations can actually work across languages that way. It is like the equivalent of doing a word-by-word translation.

Another way to put it is that this is essentially no longer "writing language", it's some alternate form of meaning representation. Language is not just a sequence of independent words.

xenodium• 11 months ago

If you're a beginner (like me), I built a little space-invaders-like game to help me practice the kana https://xenodium.com/mochi-invaders-now-on-the-app-store It's free (no ads nor funny business).

inatreecrown22• 11 months ago

nice little game!

mastermage5• 11 months ago

Mw out here in Japan being barely able to rrad any kanji but being able to hold reasonable small talk in Japanese. Spoken Communication yes written forget it.

victorp13• 11 months ago

Small nuance, but the term ワープロ馬鹿 actually is unrelated to software like MS Word, and refers to the at one point ubiquitous ワープロ (Word Pro) dedicated hardware device that many Japanese people owned in the 80s/90s to write letters. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor#Japanese_word_p...

Interestingly the English Wikipedia page above only mentions Japanese word processor devices in a small section, but the Japanese version of that page is almost entirely dedicated to these hardware devices: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3...

I was lucky enough to live with a Japanese family in the early 90s and used one to learn how to type Japanese but also write letters home in my own language. I guess you had to live through this age to understand the difference of how Word Pro is used and the hardware association it has in Japanese.

movedx• 11 months ago

Thanks for sharing this part of your life. That’s so cool.

Tor3• 11 months ago

A Toshiba Rupo word processor (found in both links) is safely stored in the backyard shed, together with some floppies and documentation. That'll be my winter project next year.

oracel• 11 months ago

The other weird thing about that term is that it's somewhat uncommon to see 馬鹿 actually written out in kanji, as those characters mean horse and deer with no direct association with 'idiot' (the proposed etymology is a reference to Chinese history and/or a Sanskrit loanword). I guess in a way the kanji form is a word processor autocomplete tell.

jongjong• 11 months ago

I'm convinced that different people process handwriting (and movement) differently. This is true with latin languages as well.

I think this may explain the difference between recognizing shapes versus drawing them for some people.

I remember when I was in school, some people had really neat handwriting, they could write fast and all their letters looked exactly the same with apparently little effort. On the other hand, I had to focus hard to ensure that my letters were all the same style, shape, size and slope... Also, I didn't have a single 'handwriting style' I could write in a number of different styles. I couldn't have both speed and nice looking, consistent letters; it was one or the other.

The interesting thing though is that I was always quite good at drawing... Conversely, I noticed that the people who had beautiful, effortless handwriting would typically be quite bad at drawing... They were the kinds of people who had to start out every drawing as a bunch of circles, triangles and crosses before joining them together to form the final drawing.

I feel like these people automate their hand to some extent. It's like a reflex to them. It lets them render common shapes without much thinking or effort.

It reminds me of that time I did a drawing class and the teacher kept reminding students to "stop thinking in symbols and just draw the different shapes and shades as they appear."

This probably has parallels in a number of areas like sports (e.g. tennis) where being able to offload certain movements to muscle memory can free up your brain for more strategic aspects of the sport.

This also reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking fast and slow." I suspect it would be interesting to try to categorize people based on what kinds of mental activities they offload to system 1 vs system 2 thinking.

jcims• 11 months ago

What if we call this 'constructive recall', in which your mind needs to take a concept and generate the concrete manifestation of it, vs 'recognition', which is the obverse. There are many examples of this in life, aren't there?

Imagine a song you used to love as a kid and knew by heart. Now try to write down the lyrics word for word. Typically quite difficult.

Now play the song and sing along. You not only know all the words, your mind provides you a just-in-time recollection of all the nuance in the delivery, the pauses, the details of the music itself, nearly a perfect replay of the entire song is there in your mind...you just couldn't knit it together like you can when it's there in front of you.

I've noticed something similar when listening to podcasts. If I'm out doing something, typically driving, while listening to a podcast episode for the first time, I will have these intrusive photographic recalls of what I was doing at that time if I listen to it again. At least if I do that within the first few weeks.

Just seems like a general characteristic of the brain.

NalNezumi• 11 months ago

Don't worry it's common for natives too.

Not born & raised in Japan but went to Saturday school for Japanese in Europe and I was excited to be able to read (and understand) the newspaper for the first time at middle school, because my Kanji caught up. From there it's usually very quick how much Kanji you can learn.

But now, 20 years later? When I need to go to fill forms I flip up my phone and search for Kanji all the time. And I know I'm not alone (although probably very bad by Japanese standards), but I can navigate Japan just fine.

I always struggled to explain this to my European friends. "I can read and talk fluently without any issue, but writing not so much. Unless on keyboard".

The best analogy I've come up with is "If I ask you to imagine an apple or a Motorbike, you can do it right. When you see one, you'll instantly recognize what it is. But if I ask you to paint an apple, or a motorbike, you might not fare too well; people might mistake your painting of a motorbike for a bicycle. It's something like that. Using keyboard is like googling for images and copying it in to your PowerPoint slides"

nachteilig• 11 months ago

Is it this way for Hiragana and Katakana for you too? I just started and have not moved on to Kanji yet, and I already struggle to write them.

anigbrowl8• 11 months ago

nta but that is just a matter of practice. Just write every day and i will become automatic after a few months.

coffeeling19• 11 months ago

A lot of Japanese learners do hate katakana (personally, a lot of fonts could stand to be clearer about ツシンソ ), because most writing is in kanji+hiragana so they have less practice with katakana. But kana ability is really just exposure. Use it to get used to it.

Same reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from.

h2zizzle• 11 months ago

I find myself having trouble remembering the spelling of certain words, now that autocomplete is almost ubiquitous. It sometimes takes writing them out and looking at the result ("Is it 'beleive'? No, definitely 'believe'.") to remember the correct spelling. Chinese character recall is probably closesly associated with that than with romaji recall.

nottorp• 11 months ago

Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.

No but when I last tried to hand write a long text in the latin alphabet, my hand hurt after a while. Skills atrophy when not used, more complex skills may atrophy faster.

gchamonlive• 11 months ago

How is it possible for you to "see" the text in your mind and not be able to replicate it with a pen? Even if the mental image is faint and fuzzy, surely you can sketch it out roughly at first, then refine it until it settles into its exact form? Apparently, that is not how mental images work, either.

That's really not how it works. I draw as a hobby and I love to study human anatomy. I can conjure in my mind people in many poses with detail, in different clothes and colour. Still the act of drawing without a reference is a world in itself. If I try to sketch from memory without a reference, it quickly falls apart.

It's not that the mental image is incomplete, wrong or an illusion. Is just that knowing it and reproducing it are two very different things.

kayodelycaon• 11 months ago

I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought.

I think this various from person to person because I don’t think in language.

koakuma-chan• 11 months ago

"is point is that learning kanji presents two obstacles: remembering what the shapes mean and remembering how they are pronounced."

How is this different from English words? How is conscientiousness pronounced? Not to mention rendezvous.

xandrius3• 11 months ago

The difference is that for most words you can easily get 90% there in English and, even if you don't read it properly, the listener can somewhat get what you are trying to say.

And say you don't know how to read "conscientiousness" but you know how to read "con" and "ousness" you can try to go for con-shu-tiouness and at least you're somewhere.

It's not the case with Kanjis, sure you might know one part of a word but you might be wrong. Also similar looking kanji don't read similarly at all, so even that is out of the window.

And don't get me started on the approach of applying memoization techniques purely on the strokes of a kanji, that's gonna hurt more than not.

Simple examples:

- 末 and 未

- 大 and 犬

- 千 and 干

numpad08• 11 months ago

It actually works the same way in Japanese. Radicals give rough clues about meanings as well as pronunciation. Similar looking kanji do read similarly. It's just... you can read pronounce "brochures" in either French style or in Southern American, and which one is more appropriate depends.

edit: Simple examples:

  - 臆 and 億
  - 誤 and 語
  - 諦 and 締

codedokode4• 11 months ago

The advantage though is that even if you don't know the word, you can guess the meaning if it contains familiar character(s). Also except for the first one, your examples are easy to distinguish.

e4325f• 11 months ago

Words in English are built from characters we can pronounce individually and this extends to words so whilst you might not get it perfect you can at least guess the sound of an English word. This isn't the case for characters in Mandarin or Japanese, no sound is encoded in the strokes, the equivalent of a character.

codedokode4• 11 months ago

Actually English spelling is pretty complicated and completely different from pronunciation. Why on Earth you Englishmen write "a" (as in skate) but pronounce it as "ei". And why you have so many versions for each vowel and why you have 3 letters for "k" sound and 2 letters (i, y) for the same sound.

mytailorisrich3• 11 months ago

English is written using an alphabet. Alphabets are by and large phonetic so you do not need to remember how to pronounce every word, you learn to read the alphabet and specific spelling (e.g. 'th' in English) and you are mostly done.

Chinese is written using ideograms ('kanji' in Japanese), which convey a meaning but not a pronounciation. So when you encounter a new character you cannot pronounce it.

coffeeling19• 11 months ago

Chinese is written using ideograms ('kanji' in Japanese), which convey a meaning but not a pronounciation. So when you encounter a new character you cannot pronounce it.

This isn't quite true - about 80% of Chinese characters are so-called phonosemantic compounds, where people originally started using the character for one thing for another thing whose word sounded similar (say, emoji for "can", as in able to) and then adding a semantic component to differentiate the character from other similar-sounding ones. In Chinese, they smushed the two components into the space of one character, but in eg. Egypt, they simply wrote whe semantic clarifier and the phonetic hint side by side, full size.

That is, the majority of the characters are primarily sound-based, it's just that the connection between a character and its sound is shoddy, even in Chinese languages.

Japanese kun readings for native words do divorce the characters pretty completely from their sound.

leelin• 11 months ago

Years ago I asked my teacher what percent of street merchants or high school kids would know how to write some of the more complicated, uncommon characters from the advanced textbooks. She replied street merchants maybe 50%, but high school students 100% -- during high school every student will be at their lifetime peak literacy, because they will be cramming and memorizing how to write every possible character in preparation for the college entrance exams.

I tell locals I can "speak, read, and type", but only have 1st grade writing abilities in Mandarin. The key is typing -- you can chat on Line, WeChat, email, or any mobile apps to accomplish day-to-day tasks. But the typing is phoenetic either via Roman pinyin, zhuyin, romaji, etc.

So yes, this problem only comes up in languages where drawing the characters are mostly independent of the pronunciation. You don't need to type individual words, you can type phrases and the input tool presents choices sorted by most commonly used. Therefore, even sending communication is closer to a reading exercise rather than a writing exercise.

yubblegum• 11 months ago

"I used to know how to write code in ${language} but not anymore, though I can still read it. There is even a term for it: LLM baka (LLM馬鹿), meaning LLM idiot"..

makeitdouble• 11 months ago

This is a fascinating subject, that would merit some input from other languages IMHO.

Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.

In alphabetic languages with separate pronounciation (French, English etc.) people forget spelling instead. And of course we recognize spellings we know, even if we couldn't recall it cold from memory.

Another point: the article defines kanji as images, but each character can be parsed as a composition of base blocks (radicals), and people primarily remember those. Put in computer terms, kanji are not bitmaps but overlayed vectorial blocks. That I think makes a world of difference for how we handle them, foreigner and native alike.

Razengan• 11 months ago

Learning about radicals was a massive Level Up in my Japaneseability.

THey're like protocols/interfaces on OOP classes ^^ or more accurately, like "tele" and "phone" in "telephone", "icon" in "iconography" and obviously many more words in English made up of bits and pieces of other words.

Once you recognize the parts, you'll be able to able to guess/infer what the word means even if it's your first time seeing it. Same with radicals in Kanji.

pazimzadeh• 11 months ago

Interesting topic but a lot of the articles on this blog reads like undeclared LLM slop:

This is also why I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought. Most of what you remember is nothing like an approximate copy of the things you experienced in real life—even in the specific case of text, memory is not even remotely like a paraphrase of previously read words. Many of our thoughts happen in a highly abstracted and distilled form, interacting and connecting with each other as a network that simply cannot be faithfully converted into a sequence of words, however long. The fact that people can fail even at something as basic as sketching a kanji or a vehicle they've seen hundreds of times before is just another example of the same phenomenon.

A pet peeve of mine is when someone uses their personal datapoints to generalize for humanity. Every sentence here should say “for me”.

What they said doesn’t even support the idea that language is a bottle-neck for thought, it actually argues against it. If language can’t capture the complexities of thought, then that’s the opposite point as language is a bottle-neck for thought.

I read the linked article https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-th... and it clearly is comprised of a lot of LLM slop.

“In techie terms, the Chinese script doesn't support the structure of languages like English and Japanese. It doesn't have what it takes.”

That’s not techie that LLM slop

“Sometimes, instead of using them for their meaning, they used them for (gasp!) their pronunciation. By ignoring the original content of a kanji, they could string them together to form almost any sound.”

I’m becoming allergic (gasp!) to this kind of writing

bitbasher• 11 months ago

I can relate a lot to this post.

I learned Japanese around the same time (2010~). I even lived in Japan and studied at a Japanese university.

To this day I have a hard time recalling Japanese on the spot. However, when I hear Japanese or see it written, I can read and understand well. Even kanji I haven't seen in a decade. It's kinda strange.

I'm pretty sure if I re-studied Japanese I would learn very quickly as I re-activate that part of my brain... something that has been on my todo list for a long time!

snozolli• 11 months ago

I had a friend in college whose mother was an immigrant and whose father had grown up bilingual and spent years in the mother's county. My friend was able to hear and understand the mother's tongue with apparent fluency, but had an extremely difficult time forming real sentences in the language, even though he'd heard and understood it for his entire life.

I think there's a significant difference between consuming language and producing it, whether that's written or spoken. It might explain the number of people I see these days who don't understand basic English grammar and make words plural by slapping on an apostrophe and an s.

hi41• 11 months ago

> This is also why I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought

I am not sure I agree with this. We think our thoughts using language. I don’t language is the bottleneck.

93po• 11 months ago

i think you're missing the point. imagine this:

you're walking down a beautiful waterside bridge in kyoto during cherry blossom season. there's really delicious smelling grilled eel from the store next to you. there's a swedish lady walking by you with a cute accent. your skin feels slightly sticky from humidity.

what i just wrote doesn't even begin to encapsulate the entirety of that moment. there were a million other details your brain can form about that moment: the style of brick on the bridge, the other people around you, the sun being in your eyes, that you're smelly bc you forgot deodorant that morning.

to put it shorter: a picture is worth a thousand words. and the author is saying that by having to use language to describe pictures, we have a huge bottleneck

tines• 11 months ago

Not sure if someone else has already commented on this, but this is the fate of people who primarily use LLMs to code. They’ll be like second-generation children of immigrants, who can vaguely understand the meaning of their parents’ native tongue, but lack the ability to produce utterances on their own.

The ultimate goal of AI companies imo is to disincentivize people from pursuing programming as a career by loss-leading with low LLM prices until nobody actually knows how to code without an LLM, and then jack up the prices.

Abimelex• 11 months ago

when I learned Japanese in university I learned writing with the exact method by James W. Heisig. So I didn't used Japanese for about 20 Years since, I forgot almost everything I learned, except the Kanji. I can still remember most of them. It's crazy!

joshdavham2• 11 months ago

This article actually hits on a pet peeve of mine where I feel people sorta “mystify” kanji/hanzi unnecessarily.

The truth is that there’s actually nothing particularly weird about being able to read some kanji but not be able to write them…

You actually get close to my point here:

Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.

Yes! But have you ever heard of someone forgetting how to spell certain words in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (e.g., English)? I can use myself as an example here: while writing this comment, I forgot how to spell “peeve” in “pet peeve” (I thought it had an ‘a’ in it) and I also forgot how to spell “unnecessarily” (I thought it had one n and two c’s).

The western equivalent of being able to read some kanji but not write them is simply called bad speling. No need to mystify kanji in particular.

jaylaal• 11 months ago

Nice comparison. When I was living in China, I'd encounter someone who forgot how to write the characters for a word on a weekly basis. I think the difference is that with Latin alphabets you can still misspell something, and having gotten it down on paper, still rely on phonetics to convey your meaning.

taeric3• 11 months ago

This is an area where the modern insistence that English isn't phonetic baffles me.

teleforce2• 11 months ago

Alphabet is such an underrated invention. It's probably higher in significance compared to the invention of wheel. It's the original "bicycle of the mind". For example, Korea pivoting from Chinese characters to its own alphabet or Hangul is very well documented including the positive effects it has in the much improved Korean literacy and civilization after the conversion. Fun facts anyone can learn Hangul alphabet in a single day if they wanted to but the same cannot be said to Chinese characters. If your mother tongue is Korean (e.g Korean American) that only just started learning, it only take one day turnover from illiterate to literate.

vunderba3• 11 months ago

I don't think anyone is "mysticizing" the language. It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.

IMHO spelling is an inapt analogy. Every single word I can communicate orally, I can write. Sure I might mess up "I before E" or some other minor issue, but I'm BUILDING the word from first principles, e.g., syllable phonemes. That's why kids are taught to "sound it out" at a young age.

The closest equivalent you have in logographs might be radicals.

coffeeling19• 11 months ago

I don't think anyone is "mysticizing" the language. It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.

People absolutely do mystify the operation of kanji, like they're more than scribbles that point to words, or that Japanese would fall to incomprehensibility and ruin if they were done away with.

It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.

That is, the majority of the characters are primarily sound-based, it's just that the connection between a character and its sound is shoddy, even in Chinese languages.

Japanese kun readings for native words do divorce the characters pretty completely from their sound.

throwup238• 11 months ago

Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.

I’ve actually done this all the time as a bilingual speaker with my language in Cyrillic. It doesn’t happen often but once in a while I’ll freeze and be unable to remember which glyph makes which sound when switching alphabets/languages.

ktosobcy• 11 months ago

> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
Yes! But have you ever heard of someone forgetting how to spell certain words in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (e.g., English)?

Erm... great that you gave English as an example but I'd argue this mostly applies to English. I remember wondering why "spelling bee" was a thing when watching shows from the USA because that wouldn't make any sense in Polish. Same with Spanish. And a lot of others. There are some minor things to remember and you can do errors but in 99,(9)% of the cases it's "you write what you hear".

It could have been a case for English as well but the reform efforts were killed so here we are with all it's quirkyness :)

diob• 11 months ago

Yes! I've studied Japanese for years and read numerous novels in it each year, yet I couldn't physically write to save my life.

But there's nothing crazy about that, like you said it's similar to spelling (not entirely, as I can spell things fine if I have a phonetic keyboard that "writes" for me).

Writing vs reading to me, is more about the type of memory.

Recognition vs recall.

derf_• 11 months ago

> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.

When I was in grade school, I took notes for my classes using Tengwar (elvish) runes as a way to alleviate boredom and force myself to pay attention (just taking the table in Appendix E from Lord of the Rings and transliterating English letters into them). I could do this at a speed sufficient to keep up with a teacher talking, so pretty fast. I cannot read any of these notes today, much less write them.

If you don't use this stuff for a few decades, you do forget, even when it's just an alphabet.

Macha6• 11 months ago

I learned how to write cursively in school, but as soon as it was no longer mandatory I switched back to print capital letters and some years later to print letters entirely, as it was just much easier for me to make legible.

At this point, it's fair to say I _have_ forgotten how to properly write cursive capitals, if I tried I'd just end up with print capitals with random tails for most of them.

themafia• 11 months ago

Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.

Printing? No.

Cursive? Yes.

Izkata• 11 months ago

The reverse almost happened to me before, I write almost exclusively in cursive and once or twice had to stop and think about what a capital Q was supposed to look like.

joshdavham2• 11 months ago

This is probably a better argument than my original comment (and much simpler!)

I actually can't write cursive at all, but I can usually read it fine. This is because I went to school when they stopped teaching cursive.

But alas, an article entitled "I used to know how to write in cursive" probably won't be very interesting to HN readers...

Keyframe• 11 months ago

This happened with cyrillic to me. During Yugoslavia we had to learn both latin and cyrillic. Since I'm from Croatia, I didn't have a need much for cyrillic (or at all). Today, I can read _at speed_ (including subtitles) cyrillic just fine, but I probably couldn't write a thing if my life depended on it. It's weird when I think about it.

kazinator• 11 months ago

It's sort of the same like being able to recognize a bunch of people, but not being able to draw their faces to a good resemblance.

Recognition and production are separate skills.

littlekey• 11 months ago

I went through Heisig's book THREE times, writing out each character and reviewing them multiple times each in Anki. I had several notebooks like the one in the OP article.

I still can't write most kanji.

The fact is that you simply cannot learn to write without practicing writing (in real contexts, outside of the notebooks); there is overlap, but it's the same thing as learning the "theory" of a math problem and then blanking once you're asked to solve a problem on a test.

If I try to visualize a word/character that I know, I often end up with a vague picture of the most salient lines, but missing some of the finer detail that would be required to write it out accurately. And I think this is largely fine, as handwriting characters isn't a very important skill anymore. Especially in Japanese where you can always fall back on kana and be understood.

I do still think "learning" the kanji is helpful because there is a system behind it, and understanding that system helps to learn words. To give an example, learning the 教/kyou in 教育/kyouiku (education) helps you make a connection to 教室/kyoushitsu (classroom), and helps you distinguish it from 勉強/benkyou (study) where you'd really think the kyou would be 教, but it isn't!

But crucially, this is all a visual recognition problem, nothing to do with producing the characters yourself. So I think the ideal learning approach is word-first but with some attention to the characters in the word, especially how they relate to other words with those characters/radicals or with the same readings.

anigbrowl8• 11 months ago

This thread is reminding me that I desperately want a way to way to have different font sizes for different languages. I like my English text small, but kanji/Chinese characters are obviously more visually dense. So I default to 10/12 point for latin alphabet but I need somewhere between 20-25 point to read Japanese comfortably. Where the two are mixed, like in this thread or on social media (where maybe half my feed is Japanese) it's a massive pain in the ass.

inatreecrown22• 11 months ago

agree this would make a nice accessibility setting in browsers. or maybe there exists a browser extension?

kameleonic• 11 months ago

You'd be surprised how many Japanese people themselves forget. Predictive text changed everything.

BrtByte5• 11 months ago

I've noticed the same thing (not with Japanese), but even after learning to write in Korean, my ability to handwrite faded way faster than my reading skills. I figured it was just laziness, but it makes sense that reading and writing use totally different parts of the brain.

coffeeling19• 11 months ago

How do you lose the ability to handwrite in Korean? That sounds weird to me.

I used to know how to write in Japanese

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