After years of putting off handwriting Japanese since almost all of my communication was verbal or over the internet where I had to type it - my experience was

After years of putting off handwriting Japanese since almost all of my communication was verbal or over the internet where I had to type it - my experience was that writing is vastly more important than people make it out to be. Especially the kind of people who are only interested in verbal communication (of which I was one). My experience mirrors this study for Japanese at least. Instead of typing sentences for vocabulary learning I have a journal where I write them instead. I'd say I learn words and kanji more quickly ever since I made that change. So while the study was for Arabic, and from scratch, my experience is from Japanese and roughly 1 - 1.5 years into learning (so wasn't a novice/from scratch at that point).