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Comment by redthrow | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, you would think native Chinese speakers are somewhat invested in writing those characters.

http://thepenngazette.com/characters-in-search-of-writers/

That aside, as it currently stands, yes, if someone were to learn Chinese/Japanese long term, yes, learning to recognize a few hundred characters helps in understanding a lot of native materials.

I'd say learning how to write those characters is mostly a waste for anyone other than historians, although kids are forced to learn it in school (I was one of them).

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> I’d say learning how to write those characters is mostly a waste for anyone other than historians

You are totally wrong here: this is a useful skill for anyone living there because, like it or not, this is how people are actually writing their languages. Also have a look at any scientific paper written in Korean and you will see how comical it is: every conceptual word is follow by its writing in Chinese characters in parenthesis because there is so many homophones for all the loan words coming from Chinese that using a phonemic script makes the text un-understandable.

You must have misunderstood, when I said "write", I meant handwriting, with stroke order and all. There's no need to learn to write this way, at all, for almost anyone.

Oh I see. But then, handwriting taken appart, stroke order does matter and is a feature for more easy remembering. One actually only have to rote learn 500 characters to get a feeling of the system and then handwriting get optional. Anyway, how would you recommend to learn the characters instead?

Like Prof Victor Mair says, if someone is a beginner, I don't recommend learning characters at all for the first 2-3 years.

(If you are a Japanese learner, learning kana wouldn't hurt, it takes a few weeks at most anyways vs years for kanji - and it's not like you "master" kanji after those years, as any native speaker would be able to demonstrate).

2-3 years is an awfully long time to spend learning a language without being able to read, though. And if you plan to learn it later anyway, you might as well start with it from the beginning.

Yeah I should've said "I don't recommend learning how to write the characters by hand in the first 2-3 years, or ever".

As gibolt said, it's much easier to just learn to recognize characters, without being able to write them by hand.

If you learn Japanese for, say, 2 years, even without consciously trying to learn the characters (e.g. by using rikai-chan/kun) when reading articles, you'll encounter the same words over and over so you'll be able to recognize them, even if you can't write them by hand. And that's good enough.

Most native Japanese speakers cannot write words like 咀嚼 or 憂鬱 by hand, but many more can pronounce them just fine.

You can easily recognize 500 words (~750 characters) within a month. Picking them up after you learn everything else becomes even harder.

As a person who learned and teaches it, don't skip the characters.

Pr Mair have his opinion on the matter, I have mine. And while he his famous in his field, given I have formal education in Japanese at the MA level, some self taught Chinese proficiency (mostly reading) and linguistic knowledge (mostly phonology) about both these languages and some of their older varieties, I would not blindly follow his advice that I think is misleading.

That doesn't mean Chinese education is perfect right now, and I also think that traditional characters, while seeming more complex can be better for beginners as the system has a more regular internal consistency. And it's easier to learn simplified when knowing traditional than the reverse.

Having studied Japanese the physical motion of writing out the characters has significantly improved my retention of them.

They each have a specific order which makes the radicals and similarities and relationships between different characters clear.

Yeah, I'd recommend actually learning the language (vocab, pronunciation etc), rather than trying to learn the characters and trying to improve the retention of them.

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