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You're right that most of the time, you use a computer or cell phone when "writing" Chinese characters. In fact, many Chinese will tell you that - beside their own name (used as a signature) - they almost never write any Chinese characters by hand. Today, writing Chinese characters is more for memorization than for practical purposes. You might know a few ...

I think you are right in your desire to put as much time as possible into the speaking and listening aspects of Chinese. But there are various reasons why it's important to put in the effort to learn Chinese characters, even though the initial investment of time is quite large. As others have explained, passive recognition is no substitute for active ...

There is nothing in the linguistic research that proves that writing the characters physically improves one's ability to recognize them in context (as in reading). If that were true, physically handicapped people who cannot write or speak would not be able to read or comprehend language, and clearly that is not the case. Virtually all of the "evidence" ...

I would like to answer this question with an analogy to English. In English, You may not learn how to spell the word, and you could only rememeber the pronunciation and the meanings for every word, so you can "speak" English,but you can't write them down or read them. I believe in old times, when few people could get well educated, this might happen (in ...

I have been able to purchase in China books that have different styles of handwriting including shortcuts. They also have a layer of thin paper over the top of each page so you can trace. You can also look for books that show common characters written in different styles from print, traditional to script etc. This is not something you will be taught unless ...

I don't think that you are taught to write "cursive" in Chinese, most of it is something people just adapt naturally. You just need a really good grasp of characters to understand it. Sometimes people write fast and tend to simplify parts. There is no standard mold for cursive like in english. But what you can do is read a lot of handwritten documents, just ...

One advantage of learning how to handwrite characters is that it makes it easier to distinguish similar-looking characters in unfamiliar contexts. If you can't handwrite you might still be able to correctly read known words like 快乐 and 决定, but if you encounter a new word such as 决心 it's sometimes hard to tell whether the first character is kuài or jué ...

Ok, this is similar to another question about why certain people refer to 土豆 as peanuts and some as potato and some other people as something else. Prior to the official process of simplification of characters there has already been different ways in which people were simplifying writing different characters, it didn't just happen overnight. So for certain ...

If you actually write out Chinese characters, you will get a better feel for the "structure" of the language. That's because they can be grouped in "families." For instance, this word 妈 means "mother," and is pronounced ma (first tone). Take away the woman radical to the left, and you get ma (third tone), which means "horse," which is the phonetic, or ...

You are right, from a practical standpoint, spending 50% of your time (as you say, I haven't measured it) might seem a little too much. Although as it was said, practicing writing not only improves your writing but also your reading as you record the characters' forms in your subconscious (so to speak) In my case, writing is what I like most of ...