Heyyyyy wazza ppl? Should I practice writing Japanese? I've actually heard bad things about trying to learn to write and speak this language at the same time and now I'm confused? Help plz!!!
I don’t know what bad things you may have heard, but writing practice is very important. Critical, even. Also practice reading out loud. These practices are necessary to establish the neural-motor pathways used in reading and writing.
writing it isn’t much hard. Just like the English alphabet, each character represents a letter so you should definitely learn to write it down. Speaking on the other hand I have no clue as it’s almost completely different than the English method of making the character sounds, for example ぬ or ゆ
You should definitely learn to write the kana, and while some people don't bother imo learning to write kanji is a good idea too. While for the most part I've been too lazy to write them, the ones I did learn to write I can distinguish form other ones much easier. If nothing else being able to write the 80 most common would be a good idea
It's not bad. Just hard to do both at the same time especially at the beginning. Also, people often end up doing one or the other more and their opinion follow the side they choose to focus. There are N1 holders, for example, that struggle with basic conversation. N1 takes roughly 5 years depending on how you study. On the other hand, I know a few people that are only 1-2 years in, know only 200 kanji but are fully able to have basic conversation. Because they started to speak with japanese after one month of studying japanese.
So, it's more like a problem of preferences or tendencies. People end up favoring one side over the other. Idealy, it would be nice to do both but in practice, I never saw someone fully able to practice both at the same in a balance manner. And I know it personnaly since it's what I'm trying to do. On one side, I want to be able to speak japanese fluently because I met some japanese and it's one of my motivation to study japanese. On the other side, I want to try the kanji kentei test one day and read pretty difficult text (science stuff for example).
And the result is that I'm neither good at speaking/listening nor writing/reading compared to other people at the same "level". But I'm fine with that. You can do that too but be sure to consider that before. Also, I can't focus on everything at the same time (otherwise, I will burn out). It's more like I have phase where I focus on one thing. Like, recently, I gave up on writing because the effort outweight the benefit for now. I will come back it in maybe 1 to 3 months once I'm done with my current objectives.
Anyway, to sum up, should you? No, absolutely not. But, if it align with your personal preferences/tendencies, yeah, go for it. Just think of writing as a powerful tool to remember kanjis or words. You don't need it but it's a tool that you can use. Also, just know that you will unlock additional difficulties depending on your choices. Like focusing on reading/writing can help a lot to distinguish homophones in japanese. And ironically, it's really important when it comes to listening or speaking... On the other hand, reading/writing only can be harmful to your speaking/listening ability. Just on the vocabulary side, Japanese don't use the same words while writing or speaking. And that can be really annoying when every 3 words, they are like "what did you say?". And that's just one single problem.
So, well, define your personnal goals, find people that share the same goals, follow their advises and just ignore the others. You will achieve your goal faster and be happier by doing that. It's just that at some point, you may have to deal with your "weakness" and "writing" may be the tool that you need to fix some of those weaknesses. And it's fine. Especially, when you're happy with your japanese journey so far.
