@jkl – That’s a great point. I guess I unconsciously picked up on that. I can practice writing without powering up my computer in the morning. If have 15 free minutes before work, I spend that writing, instead of losing 5 minutes getting into Anki. In the evening, if I get sick of flash cards, I can take a quick break, and the last few days the “break” was practicing writing, and I felt refreshed after that.

I’ve also found I can only learn so many new vocab words before I start to stumble, and learn fewer vocab words because I’m trying to get familiar with too many new ones at one time. If I mix in writing practice it doesn’t seem to impact my ability to learn vocab words, but piling on more vocab would make it trickier.

Also, thanks for the feedback on learning the stroke order rules. That makes sense. I won’t bother trying to memorize them for now based on your thoughts, and I’ll see how it goes.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by  hey.

That makes sense. Although, I must confess it seems like an awful lot to learn all at once. Maybe it’s not so bad. I’m trying to do 5 a day, we’ll see if that’s a realistic pace, and so far it’s not that bad.

Yggbert:
Stroke order is one of those things I’ll do to improve my handwriting when it will actually matter, which is probably not going to be until you are in Japan. You can still have perfectly respectable handwriting without knowing the stroke order too.
Focus on grammar and vocab, more important to me for sure.

@Yggbert – That was my initial position as well. What I found was when I’m trying to read I need to look up a kanji. I can sometimes quickly find the kanji using radicals. Other times I can waste an hour, and still not find it. Now, even with my incredibly limited writing experience I can find kanji more quickly by guessing the stroke order. It hasn’t always worked out for me, but I expect that’s where more experience will come into play. Still, it saves me time, and it is something I need to do eventually anyway, so I might as well integrate it into my studies.

I can’t take credit for this discovery though. It was MissingNo15 that pointed it out to me.

Hm, interesting. I can’t help but notice the two don’t match up exactly. They’re close in a lot of ways. I suspect the best answer is to learn a fair number of kanji and these rules will become second nature?