Can Japanese Actually Write Japanese Kanji?

What Hacker News said

Cites redthrow · 2016-08 · on “An introduction to Japanese”

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]

Cites Grue3 · 2017-03 · on “The miracle of reading and writing Chinese characters”

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

Cites redthrow · 2021-07 · on “Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO”

> 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]

Cites bane · 2024-02 · on “History of Vietnamese Typography”

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 t