> Without practice writing the characters by hand you’ll have a really hard time remembering them!
Without practice writing them by hand you'll have a hard time remembering how to write them. Reading them is a separate skill; a lack of ability to write the characters will not impede you from reading them.
No. What the parent said. Learning how to write them puts knowledge of the glyphs' shapes in your body not just your memory. You will read them better too.
- I have been certified HSK4, which isn't much. That was a long time ago; I haven't tried to get a higher level of certification.
- I regularly correspond with Chinese people in Mandarin.
- I can communicate orally at a rudimentary level. I have managed tasks such as renting an apartment and negotiating the purchase of an empty box from a bakery.
- Several people have expressed shock, on meeting me in person, at my inability to speak fluently. (One person went the other way, meeting me in person first, observing that I couldn't really speak Chinese, and going out of her way to write to me in English, which she wasn't really comfortable in. She seemed fairly outraged when she saw that I wrote to other Chinese people in Chinese.)
- I can read material of the kind that regularly comes up in my conversations without problems. For other material, I need a dictionary. This means that my vocabulary is a mixture of quite a bit of basic daily-use stuff, some specialized terminology that no one (including native speakers) would really be expected to know, and some gaping holes that no native speaker would have.
- I like to watch Chinese karaoke videos. I am mostly unable to understand the lyrics by ear, except for particularly simple lyrics. But I can often get a good idea of the lyrics by watching them show up (as karaoke prompts) in real time.
- I can write maybe on the order of 20-50 characters. When I corresponded in handwriting, I would have to look up how to write more than 90% of what I wanted to write.
You have the skills you use. If you need to read, then you can read. If you don't need to write, you probably can't write. Character amnesia arises for the obvious reason that reading is an important skill in Japan and China, but writing isn't and therefore many people are unable to write common words.
I have no idea what twangist is thinking, but it's certainly not connected to reality. The two possibilities I see are
(1) He is a native speaker of Chinese or Japanese, and "reading" means something very different to him than it does to a foreign speaker.
(2) He is not a native speaker of Chinese or Japanese, he's barely able to read in one of those languages, and he is not aware that he'd learn to read more effectively by reading than he can by writing.
Without practice writing them by hand you'll have a hard time remembering how to write them. Reading them is a separate skill; a lack of ability to write the characters will not impede you from reading them.