I Hate Hanzi

[jannesan]

18 hours ago, Demonic_Duck said:

If you find it a slog and have no external requirements to learn it, it's little better than wasted time. Recognition and production are separate yet related skills.

 

Not that I can present any scientific evidence, but I think you're wrong that writing and recognizing are so separate and essentially learning to write is wasted time if you don't enjoy it. I believe learning to write Hanzi will make your recognition stronger and longer lasting (especially for rare characters). Even if you stop later and forget how to write many of them (like many Chinese nowadays) I think it's absolutely not wasted time.

 

2 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

 

I am quite certain, if I learned to write Hanzi, I would forget it pretty soon.

 

Maybe you forget how to write them, but I bet your recognition will be better than without learning how to write.

 

That said, I also think you shouldn't force yourself if you don't get any enjoyment out of it. If you want to try to learn how to write, I suggest not just writing out the same character over and over, but use a SRS system. That could be the same one you use for general vocabulary memorization, just for the words you want to be able to write you stop and try to write them before continuing to the next word.

[Jiahui]

Honestly I must say, Gato, I don't know if you speak Spanish, but I do. I felt the same about learning Japanese. I could understand more or less from songs and from repeated anime words. But then, I decided to learn how to write - and not 'my own way' but the proper way, strokes and all, and it became tedious. Especially because I am left handed. And I like learning languages, mind you. I consider English my "second language" and it brought me a lot of fun ever since I started learning as a child. I just thought Japanese would be fun to learn as well, because the sounds are kind of similar to the Spanish ones. I still listen to Jpop and I can reproduce most of it way more easily than I can write anything. But about Chinese, it is giving me a new perspective on hanzi and also on kanji, interestingly. I started learning Chinese for a pretty particular reason: I wanted to know what my Chinese name would be. So I started studying surnames and names, and how they interacted with each other, so I ended up learning vocabulary and some syntax. I don't have a name yet but I am learning a bit of Chinese. I don't write it yet though..

[Solitary King]

Fascinating thread all together. I've been getting somewhat lazy with writing 汉字 recently but discovered how awesome it is to read text you are interested in. In my case it's a cool Chinese movie of which I am reading the transcript and learning more and more characters that you rarely find in textbooks but hear them in everyday life. I feel like it's helping me a lot and I actually really like 汉字 and think they're beautiful, but you do have to 吃苦 a little bit until unfamiliar ones become less and less frequent