Hey all, my goal is to be at an ability level where I would be comfortable living in Tokyo while working at a company that speaks English in the office.
To that end, I’ve been working through Genki and its workbook. I’ve noticed that the slowest part for me is the workbook exercises, because of all of the writing I’m doing. Additionally, while I’m learning kanji (through WaniKani) I’m not trying to learn how to write it. So I’m doing all of these exercises by writing down kana. This is starting to seem a little ridiculous because trying to read my kana-only answers is challenging (the kanji apparently helps me read).
Do I keep going like through all of Genki and even through Quartet? Or should I call it quits and start typing my answers?
You should definitely write kanji, writing katakana or hiragana alone will not make much of anything, since those forms are pretty basic and are kind of unrelated in most cases to actual kanji. For example all of the hiragana that have rounded forms cannot be within kanji because kanji are square shaped.
I’ve used WaniKani and while it is a great tool, it is not a replacement for writing, you can use it to learn words, but you still need to write, because otherwise the way your brain saves the information in your memory is not the same, you learn to recognise kanji by their general form rather than by its composition. At some point, and I can tell you from experience, it gets hard to differentiate between very similar kanji unless you write them and know exactly which part goes where.
If you don’t want to write anything at all and just go by using the keyboard, which I don’t recommend because of what I’ve said above, you’re better off not writing anything at all, writing hiragana/katakana won’t do much of anything.
I recommend you to go with the Heisig method, although maybe it’s not for everyone, but in my opinion it works.
Do you know of good tools to learn with the Heisig method? I’ve been using Kanshudo for building vocabulary, kanji recognition and remembering their meanings, and grammar; basically everything except writing skills. I bought Heisig’s book but not really sure if it’s worth dividing my attention from Kanshudo lessons, though the first couple Heisig chapters seemed pretty effective for remembering the kanji I reviewed. I think if I could figure out a way to study Heisig kanji with a spaced repetition system like Kanshudo I’d be a lot more motivated to work it into my study sessions 👀
I just use some Anki cards that I found online. Googling it, I found multiple Anki card decks for the Heisig method and I just chose the one that fitted me best.
I started out writing down kanji as I learned them, though I realized that for the learning style that worked best for me it was better to go ham on learning vocabulary (written with kanji). Personally I found the payoff of doing it in this order has been good just in terms of momentum.
Now though I’m at the point where my vocabulary and recognition is getting strong enough that I think I could relatively quickly pivot to learning recall by writing. I guess we’ll see. It’ll definitely help with all those kanji that barely differ by a radical or two.