Kanji Amnesia And Why It’s Okay To Forget Kanji

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In a couple hours at 1:40pm Pacific Time, I’ll be live on BBC Radio (sorry, no idea which one… people tell me it’s probably #4, though) talking about “Character Amnesia” (or for us Tofugu-folk, “Kanji Amnesia”), so I thought a good way to get my ducks in a line would be to write a post about it… That way, hopefully, I won’t forget what I want to talk about it.

What Is “Character Amnesia” (Kanji Amnesia)?

Basically, people in Japan (and China) are using computers, phones, and other electronic devices so much that they’re forgetting how to write their kanji. Thanks to these things, there’s almost no reason to write something using your hands. Think about it, when’s the last time you hand wrote anything? For a lot of you, I’m guessing it was either to sign a receipt (or you just can’t remember). The world is revolving around our phones and computers, which means we’re typing… a lot.

It’s the exact same thing with Japanese, but with Japanese, you’re taking something really a lot more complicated to write (kanji) and making it a lot simpler. All you have to do nowadays is write the sounds that make up a word in Japanese, and *poof!* automagically your electronic device shows you the most likely kanji match to the thing you wrote out. If it’s not the first match, there’s usually quite a few others which you can choose from. This means the emphasis of being able to write kanji is nearly nonexistent in real life. All you have to do is be able to recognize a kanji and be able to read it. Literally half the work of written communication has vanished, and I think it’s awesome.

For those of you who don’t have much experience with kanji (if you want to learn, check out the kanji section of TextFugu for a way to learn kanji that actually makes sense), here’s a good parallel. With English (I know this from experience), spell check has made it so I don’t have to know how to spell things. Misspelled something? Red underline tells me to change it (thanks!). Once I start writing by hand, I definitely notice all the things I don’t know how to spell (anymore) that I probably learned in middle school. Take this example and multiply it by a billion, and you have the Kanji/Japanese issue. They can recognize the kanji. They can read the kanji. They can type the kanji… but, when it comes to writing a lot of kanji by hand, expect there to be a lot of mistakes and omissions.

To Be Honest, This Is Awesome

A lot of old school Japanese teachers will probably tell you otherwise. I was one of them not too long ago, until I started writing TextFugu, and started seeing what I could remove to make the lessons simpler. When I asked “what is pretty unnecessary 90% of the time?” I realized that the ability to write kanji by hand was one of them. So, I cut that requirement so that people can focus on much more important things (like being able to read… and type the kanji).

Even Japan is admitting to this. They’re going to add nearly 200 kanji to the required kanji learning list for kids because so many kanji have become a lot more common through use of typing the characters (i.e. a lot of characters that were tough to write by hand, but became common because they’re really easy to type out). On top of that, Japan is totally a cell-phone culture. Everyone seems to have a cell phone, and everyone seems to be typing away at it. It’s just so much easier to communicate in this way, and handwriting is becoming a thing of the past.

So, in summary, I don’t think this is a bad thing, especially for language learners out there. It just (once again) supports that the ability to hand write kanji is becoming increasingly unimportant. That means you can start focusing your limited efforts (everyone has limits, so you need to make the most of them!) on doing much more important things, whatever that may be. I think that’s amazing news. You have permission to spend your time learning things that you’ll be able to use a lot more commonly :)

So what do you think? Any of you experienced this? I’ve definitely become terrible at hand writing kanji (embarrassingly terrible, actually), but on the other hand, it’s so easy to type kanji out that I have almost no reason to hand write anything. The cool thing? When I do have to hand write something, I just type it up first so I can use that as a reference… I hope any impending apocalypses don’t take away my cell phone, or I’ll be screwed.

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  • Sebastien

    The Latin alphabet is : a b c d e f… (the same as used in English and all West European languages)

  • TripMasterMunky

    I think this could be compared to writing in cursive in English. Remember how much time was spent on writing in cursive in school? Who writes in cursive in the real world now anymore? I can read cursive okay, but I wouldn’t be able to write out the alphabet in it confidently anymore.

  • Aiza

    I’m also self-study Japanese and I am at the beginning of it so Kanji is still looking terrifying. ^.^ Although I find the ability of speaking, reading and understanding way more important than writing (in almost every language:p), there is still the need to learn the kanji. Yes, we might forget them because we don’t write by hand so often, and yes, we should not stress out so much when learning them. But since we want to learn this language and we want to use it right, we should at least try to learn them at least once (it’s better to hardly remember something that not knowing it at all. And let’s be serious, the auto-correct and the options on the computer or mobile are not always right. you must at least know how it merely looks like).
    As for the Japanese themselves, I think this is a problem in every country more or less (in Romania we should use some diacritics but using the computer or the mobile which are usually set on English, we tend to forget to use them in real life too). So even the Japanese people tend to deal without it in everyday life, but for the entire nation is a mater of losing some of it’s cultural aspects. Perhaps they should try to remember how to hand write them from time to time ^.^. It’s their language and they should be proud of it. 
    In the end, not needing to write them all the time should make the kanji writing stress-less and more enjoyable.ね？ 

  • KiKo

    actually, latin is only dead by technicality that no ones first language is latin. Alot of schools throughout europe for over 500 years have taught latin (and ancient greek) to students even now. In everyday life we still use latin words and to be honest, it helps you learn and guessloads of other romantic-european language’s words.

    Eg, bread

    latin: PANEM
    french: PAIN
    spanish:PAN
    portugese:PÃO
    catalan: PA.

    notice the similarity???

  • http://www.youtube.com/user/YAMAstudios Jon Walmsley

    I think the key is not to focus on handwriting when you’re
    first learning Japanese; dedicate more of your time to learning the more useful
    stuff of reading, speaking and listening. You can still practice handwriting on
    the side if you want to but make sure most of your time is spent on the
    aforementioned aspects as these are what will get you by more. I definitely
    don’t think you should forgo handwriting all together however as it is still a
    part of the overall language (even if a less relevant one) and no matter the
    difference’s in complexity, in principle it’s still like learning English
    without being able to write the characters which is ridiculous. Just leave the bulk
    of handwriting learning till a later date when you’ve already achieved a fair
    level of competency in the other areas.

    Oh and on a side note, whilst not being the greatest speller
    isn’t a terrible thing in everyday life, spell-check and the like shouldn’t be
    an excuse not to learn if you value competency in a language. And when you do
    use it to correct mistakes you should learn from those mistakes so that in the
    future those red lines will appear less and less.

  • ぴょっちゃん

    And, thanks to loan words;
    日本語：パン
    (>.^)b

  • ぴょっちゃん

    Likewise at 17. My family and friends often comment on the sheer length of my texts and emails because I refuse, quite plainly, to use any kinds of internet slang aside from the occasional “lol” or “www” dependent on the language (^^;) Perhaps I am merely too purple in my speech, I don’t know! OTL

  • sakansi

    I find that many people only stop doing something like that because they are too lazy. Of course there are exeptions.

  • sakansi

    I fully agree with you. At some point in their life they are going to need it.

  • sakansi

    But it is very useful for training your memory and many other things.

  • Risuna

    i’m so relieved i don’t have to remember how to write kanji because my handwriting sucks so badly XD

  • みなさん

    I am going the opposite way. It helps me a tone to remember a new kanji, of which I am learning a lot right now, if I a practice by writing it. I often times think I know a kanji and can recognize it easily, but then forget a stroke when I try to write it. Being able to write a kanji, stroke by stroke, helps me to remember it. Also, I like writing kanji on my wacom tablet and looking them up by handwriting when I’m too lazy to reach for the keyboard. I don’t want writing kanji to die!

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