Marco Giancotti , August 15, 2025 Cover image: Kazuenokami Katō Kiyomasa Observing a Monkey with a Writing Brush, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi
I recently came across a short essay about kanji—Japanese logographic characters—by a certain James W. Heisig. His point is that learning kanji presents two obstacles: remembering what the shapes mean and remembering how they are pronounced. And it is a bad idea, claims Heisig, to try learning both at the same time. 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. Heisig professes simple divide and conquer.
That sounds plausible, but is it really an effective approach? How can you keep so many of those tangled squiggles in your head without even knowing how to say them out loud?
The answer is yes, it works. At least, it worked fantastically well for me. The first thing I did when I began learning the language in 2006 was opening Heisig's famous Remembering the Kanji Volume 1 and going through it, one kanji at a time, using the book's mnemonic techniques to commit to memory the meaning, construction, and stroke order of all 2042 characters in the book. No thought to pronunciations, words, grammar—just the way each character is written and understood. I filled several notebooks with handwritten characters as I practiced recalling them every day, and eleven months later, I had them all in my head. I could write and understand them all with little effort and, from that point on, learning how to pronounce and compose them into words and sentences felt like a breeze. Prof. Heisig has my eternal gratitude.
A practice notebook of mine from the late 2010's.
But fast-forward two decades, and the situation has evolved in an interesting way that I would never have anticipated. I spent over thirteen years in Japan, and my Japanese has only gotten better. My friends and colleagues in this period have been mostly Japanese natives, as is my spouse. I use the language every day at home, I use it to read novels and send emails, to watch South Korean shows with Japanese subtitles, and to file my taxes. I use it more than my own native language, both in spoken and written form. And yet... I cannot handwrite most of those kanji any more.
Except for a few hundred simple and/or frequently recurring characters (like those in my home address), I just cannot recall how to draw them out with a pen. I haven't completely forgotten them, and I'm perfectly capable of reading and understanding them in the blink of an eye—it's just the act of turning the intended character into ink on paper that is often impossible for me.
I'm not alone in this "character amnesia," either. Whenever I tell a Japanese native about my lost ability, they all readily admit to having forgotten how to write many kanji, too. Apparently, this is a well-known phenomenon in Japan and in China. There is even a term for it, wahpro baka (ワープロ馬鹿), meaning "word-processor idiot," from the idea that spending too much time typing into Microsoft Word makes people's handwriting skills atrophy.
Is it only me, or is all of this surprisingly deep and fascinating?
Akashi Gidayu writing his death poem before committing Seppuku, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi
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