I used to know how to write in Japanese

I went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you, I almost completely abandoned it as soon as I didn't have to take language school tests anymore.

It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards.

As a partial aside, the Heisig anecdote that leads off this piece is painful:

> Japanese children learn the spoken language first, then they learn how to write it in elementary school; Chinese students of Japanese (who tend to be pretty good at it) have pre-existing knowledge of character meanings and forms from their mother tongue, so they only have to learn how to pronounce them. Therefore, a Western learner should first focus only on the meaning and writing of those couple of thousand common characters and, only after having mastered those, should move on to studying the pronunciations.

Going from "Japanese people learn the spoken language first" to "you should spend a big chunk of time learning characters before learning sounds, words or grammar" is a pretty remarkable mental backflip.

The author says he spent eleven months doing this before devoting any time to the spoken language. If I could put the "head exploding" emoji here, I would do it. I spent only slightly more time than that at language school, and came out conversational.

The one thing I noticed when I was focusing on learning to write is that it helped me a lot with differentiating between similar characters when reading. I forget which ones now, but there are many characters that differ by a single radical and have similar meanings, knowing how to write each one helped me quite a bit there, but overall I rarely write anything other than my name and address now that I live in Japan.

I can confirm this. I passed N1 without learning to write. I later learned how to write all of the kanji, and all it does it help you distinguish very similar kanji without context. I tried learning all the compound words (i.e. which kanji to use for every word) but gave up a few thousand Anki cards in. It was time consuming and impractical. (Wanted to pass Kanken 2) Props for anyone who put in the work though.

This happens in Chinese too

Grocery lists will be a mish mash of characters and pinyin

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/jiaozi.gif

鸡, get halfway through writing 蛋, forget how to do it without a computerized pinyin input, give up, scribble it out and write dan

This was happening to people I knew when I lived in Japan 30 years ago. Many people were using wa-puro (word processors that let you type in the phonetic form and choose from the appropriate kanji). I imagine the effect is far more common now.

I remember one time when a university engineering professor couldn't remember how to write the kanji for "police". He didn't seem embarrassed asking someone else. I don't know if they still do, but they would often demonstrate by writing out the character with their index finger like a pen in the other hand's palm.

> Is ワープロ馬鹿 really a word used by native Japanese speakers?

You probably mean idiom. ワープロ (word processor) and 馬鹿 (baka: idiot) are individually both words used by Japanese speakers. Japanese speakers would be more likely to say 漢字健忘 (kanji amnesia) to refer to the phenomenon though.

It’s real. I didn’t know it was a thing until a few years ago then suddenly everything made sense.

I’m glad people are talking about it.

I would find it more surprising if the brain did not have quirky versions like this, given how complex it is and given how often our genes are not perfectly copied.

This isn’t about the kana though.

Hm, the author explicitly pointed out the same:

> What confuses me is that other people can form images in their minds. Are all those with character amnesia also aphantasic? That can't be, given that aphantasics amount to less than 5% of the population, while a much larger number of people forget how to write (70% of teenage participants in a Chinese TV show were unable to write the word "toad"!).

They were discussing their aphantasia as a precursor to other very interesting points, e.g. about how "seeing" a character in your mind isn't enough to be able to draw it, --> verbatim traces and gist traces.