I used to know how to write in Japanese

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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...

Is ワープロ馬鹿 really a word 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).

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.

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