That Japanese Man Yuta
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2016–2024
5:49 · 5.5M views · Dec 13, 2015
Yuta asks whether native Japanese speakers can actually write kanji by hand, showing that many struggle to recall characters from memory.
Cited in language-learning threads as evidence that natives often cannot handwrite kanji.
4 comments from Hacker News
I've thought about this a little bit and wonder if the result CJK readers have ended up with is the result of a few interesting historic quirks. Assuming that homophones are simply going to exist in the languages, there's probably other alternatives. For example, in the case of modern Korean readers, the Hanja can supposedly used to help clarify the meaning of a homophone where context doesn't provide clarity. But in practice, most Korean readers don't use Hanja enough to remember more than a small percentage of what they learn in school, so they work in effect as an index into a lookup table, where they look the Hanja up in a dictionary, find the definition written in Hangul, and use that to determine the meaning. Support Japanese was reformed to entirely use one or both Kana in the way that modern Koreans use mostly Hangul. Then Kanji would be used to help determine meaning in the same way. As most people wouldn't encounter Kanji with enough frequency and distribution to remember the bulk of them, only the most common would be remembered. These are unlikely to be the difficult to discern homophones as contextual clues would clarify. So the Kanji would again also end up as indexes for looking up standardized definitions. In modern Japanese, this doesn't happen because Kanji is still used with enough frequency and variety that most people sustain some level of memory about the system. The question is how well do they remember it? [1][2][3][4][5] 1 - this video 2 - [LINK] 3 - [LI
Well, often they can't write these characters at all [1] (this video is for Japanese, but the situation must be similar with Chinese) [1] this video I can recognize more than a thousand of characters (thanks to Anki) but visualising/writing them is another matter entirely, and I would probably fail to write a large fraction of them. Just like with alphabetic characters, I memorize the "shape" of the character rather than its sequence of strokes. Only when the character is indistinct, or similar to other characters do I bother to remember which radicals it consists of. For example the character for "dream" (夢) has a very distinctive shape that is easy to recognize, so I wouldn't be able to write it because I never learned how. Now take the character 緑 (green). It looks similar to 線 (line), but lacks the radical 白 (white). Because green is not white, you see (not actually, it's just a memorization technique). But it also looks similar to 録 (recording). That's because the character for "green" has radical 糸 (thread), just like "line" character. Threads can be green, and they are also lines. But "recording" uses radical 金 (metal) in its place, because recorders are made from metal. So the only things I remember about 緑 is that it has 糸 and doesn't have 白. And thus, I still won't be able to write it.
> Once they learn the 2000 joyo, pass N1, and probably do some tertiary education in Japan, then maybe they can choose to move that direction For the vast majority of people (including native speakers), knowing a few extra kanji outside of joyo brings very little benefit. Most natives get by just fine by having a very rough understanding of even joyo [1], thanks to smartphones and computers. Improving pitch accent, on the other hand, does change how you are perceived by natives [2], so it may be worth a try if your goal is to get closer to native speakers. [1] this video [2] [LINK]
I agree, I'd recommend learners to learn kana because you can learn it in a few weeks (as opposed to many years for kanji, and even after that many years, people - including natives - don't remember them very well). this video