[Wednesday]

Me and my student colleague had Chinese lessons. This is another issue but might interest you. I avoided to exercise hanzi (=kanji) writing and reading. My colleague was very interested and curious. She learned in every occasion. However, at the end, we both remained almost on the same level. She knew how to write more hanzi but our vocabulary and reading partly too were almost the same.

It depends on whether you are a visual learner and disciplined person how long you have to study the basics. For westerners I guess, it's still a big hurdle that needs 8 to 10 years. As RadioKid said, there estimations about the number of characters Japanese people use daily. In a normal Japanese class, I guess, you might learn about 400 to 500 characters. This is a lot.