There are about two thousand Chinese characters (kanji) used in modern Japanese, and while I can read only a select few (and I think that I am not up to JLPT-2 this year as well) and hand-write almost none, things are much easier with a computer. You can copy-paste them into a dictionary (a lookup using a traditional dictionary without having an idea of the pronunciation is not easy) and typing also works fine. The problem with typing, of course, is that if you only barely know what you are doing, you end up with much more devastating spelling mistakes than you could in a Western language. A single character can make a huge difference, such as turning the topic of my closing remarks in the self-introduction slides for the new job from my hobbies to my offensive odors. Ouch.