Heyoo, so recently I've been thinking of whether I should start to practice writing Kanji... So far I can write maybe 100 - 200 different Kanjis. I can still write some Kanji I've learned over a year ago without practicing like 警察官. But there are also a lot which I keep forgetting how to write. Anyway I'm wondering if I should take the effort to seriously practice the writing. Will I waste my time with it? Because nowadays I think it's not really needed anymore to be able to write by hand because computers can do it faster obviously. And if I don't practice them for a while I will forget them again sooner or later... But it's so cool to write Kanji by hand! Also, I want to make a semester abroad in Japan when I'll be in university in a few years so does anyone know if writing by hand is necessary in this case?
Writing kanji is not at all necessary for fluency, memorizing them and their (most common) readings are good enough. Maybe learning how to write a couple common ones but otherwise It's really time consuming to learn how to write kanji individually. And not all Japanese people can write as much kanji (especially the younger generations since they have technology and stuff) I recommend you watch these;
What I do is: for my vocab schedules, I use the "write in answer where possible" and then use the handwriting input tool to write the kanji.
I find that with mnemonics, knowing how to write the kanji, and their meanings, both kind of reinforce each other. So, even if you don't intend on actually writing them out by hand, it's not a completely wasted effort.
One thing to bear in mind is that, hand written kanji can be quite difficult to read at times. Knowing how to write those kanji usually is a big aid in being able to read those handwritten kanji.
It depends on your use case. You can get a hint from Renhuu's study vector on your usage.
For kanji-writing, it is usually:
- katakana to kanji
- hiragana to kanji
- picture to kanji
- sound to kanji
- other language to kanji
Which of the above activities happen to you most often? mostly, writing is used for communicating with others. If you don't need it, it is fine to skip.
For me, it is usually for kanji reading:
- kanji to meaning
- kanji to reading
If you need help memorizing kanji, then the writing practice is one of the ways to add to the memorization.
It helps a lot!