Learning Japanese, bought some textbooks. Going smoothly so far, but I was wondering?.. - can I learn to read this stuff without bothering to learn how to write it?

Yes.

You can recognize an apple; you may not be able to draw it (well).
You can recognize your parents; you may not be able to draw their faces (well).

Relative to a person's face, some may argue that the Kanas and kanjis are (easier) to draw/write.

As your kanji recognition improves, it's likely you'll also be able to draw/write them better.

Thanks, Ed! This is great news!

Did you know? There's software that translates words written in our alphabet ("tesuji") into kanji as you type them. So I'll be able to type in Japanese, at least.

..my favourite word so far is jagaimo, potatoes.

There really is no need to learn to write them if you only want to read. But I would encourage you to give it a try. I found it quite rewarding when I was learning Japanese many years ago and I think it helped me retain them better. But stroke order is important so get a good introductory book on the topic. And don't let it drop once you have started - I did and now I struggle to read more than a few of them.

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I can confirm these statements.
I am sure that writing will have a decisive effect on remembering the Kanji.

Please note that these are written in a square grid.

Stroke order is not sooo very difficult to learn. But even if you will have this order wrong occasionally, the result may still be correct.


When my wife an I visited Taiwan in November last year, one of our guides told us that the usage of smart phones, tablets, etc. by the younger generation resulted in some difficulties, when these youngsters are asked to write the Chinese characters by hand.

Number of strokes will be an issue, as well as the stroke order, even for native speakers

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I can actually read Japanese pretty well, and cannot write hardly at all. My writing Japanese is my worst skill out of the four. I use computers, so I can type the word sounds, the computer suggests some kanji, and I can recognize which Kanji is correct. This is equivalent to reading, rather than writing. There is even a trend among young people in Japan today to write poorly, with incorrect stroke order because they spend too much time on computers and texting.

Kanji dictionaries require you to know number of strokes so at least you will have to learn how to count strokes. This is not completely trivial because somethings seem to an untrained eye to be strokes when, in fact, they are not. However, even if you are not totally skillful at counting strokes you will likely be only one or two off so you still can look for the character fairly easily. Spend the money to get a good kanji dictionary such as Nelson, Spahn and Hadamitzky, or Halpern.

In response to the OP, of course you can learn to read Kanji without writing them. I would say, though, that between the "kanji I know how to write" and the "kanji I can only read", I "know" the former kanji better.

When you study a given kanji, there are variants to "knowing" it:
1. Having a rough idea of the meaning when you see it, but not knowing how to read it
2. Knowing one of the readings, but not the meaning
3. Knowing at least one meaning and at least one pronunciation
4. Knowing several of the readings
5. Knowing all of the readings
6. Knowing all words that use that kanji
7. Being able to write the kanji without looking at it
8. Knowing radicals it's composed of
9. Knowing related kanji
10. Knowing how the kanji has changed over time

There are probably even more than what I've listed here. All of these forms of knowledge are useful.

But some of these ways of "knowing" kanji are more useful than others if you have a particular goal - say to speak in Japanese. You don't need to know all of the radicals in a kanji to speak with someone, for example. But maybe it'd be helpful in some ways (e.g. maybe you can infer the meaning of a word you don't know).

I would recommend that you study what is interesting to you.

"Knowing" something has many forms and many depths. Explore the paths that are interesting to you.

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