Hey all, my goal is to be at an ability level where I would be comfortable living in Tokyo while working at a company that speaks English in the office.

To that end, I’ve been working through Genki and its workbook. I’ve noticed that the slowest part for me is the workbook exercises, because of all of the writing I’m doing. Additionally, while I’m learning kanji (through WaniKani) I’m not trying to learn how to write it. So I’m doing all of these exercises by writing down kana. This is starting to seem a little ridiculous because trying to read my kana-only answers is challenging (the kanji apparently helps me read).

Do I keep going like through all of Genki and even through Quartet? Or should I call it quits and start typing my answers?

  • Do what feels right to you! Personally, I believe writing things down physically helps learn more so than typing, as you create some muscle memory associations with the characters and vocab. But if it’s dragging you down and causing you to not study then it might be more of a hinderance

  • In my experience you can get good at reading, speaking and listening without learning how to write kanji at all. Recognising a kanji from its shapes is a totally different skill to producing those shapes on demand. For your goal of living in Tokyo for an English company, you might be able to get away without writing either.

    I would recommend though, learning the basic shapes that make up kanji, and their stroke order. Having the correct stroke order is useful both for writing kanji that others can understand, and being able to read hand written kanji later.

  • You should definitely write kanji, writing katakana or hiragana alone will not make much of anything, since those forms are pretty basic and are kind of unrelated in most cases to actual kanji. For example all of the hiragana that have rounded forms cannot be within kanji because kanji are square shaped.

    I’ve used WaniKani and while it is a great tool, it is not a replacement for writing, you can use it to learn words, but you still need to write, because otherwise the way your brain saves the information in your memory is not the same, you learn to recognise kanji by their general form rather than by its composition. At some point, and I can tell you from experience, it gets hard to differentiate between very similar kanji unless you write them and know exactly which part goes where.

    If you don’t want to write anything at all and just go by using the keyboard, which I don’t recommend because of what I’ve said above, you’re better off not writing anything at all, writing hiragana/katakana won’t do much of anything.

    I recommend you to go with the Heisig method, although maybe it’s not for everyone, but in my opinion it works.