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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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...

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!

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.

> 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).

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.

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).

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?

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

>> 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.

> 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.

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).

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!

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.

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

> 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

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.

> I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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"..

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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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).

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.