[steven]

For what it's worth, I was different in that I gave up traditional learning partway through college. Instead of trying to study Japanese from textbooks, I just decided to open my ears and take in as much as I could (while of course being active about it).

Even after I moved to Japan I didn't actively study for a while... I tried once but didn't see a point. A year ago or so, reading about Kyle and his "kanji conquest" inspired me a bit to give it another go. This time I had a different approach though-- First of all, I knew most of the words I was studying. I knew their context in everyday conversation.

I started VERY simple and have been working my way up. To give you an idea, I started with one of those Hiragana/Katakana level books for kids (it was for Japanese kids of course). I'm very happy I did that because it fixed a couple of funky stroke orders before I went on to kanji and just made my writing look better and more balanced. Then, and even now, I'm just slowly moving up. They have books for elementary school students. The first year one, and by and large the second year one were brain-dead easy for me, but there was always the odd kanji here or there (or odd usage) that would either fix a problem or just help out my spoken language. Going through those kinds of elementary school level books is great because you don't have English (or whatever your preferred language is) getting in the way.

I've seen a lot of bad translations that simply don't work well, so I prefer to just avoid the step of "translation" and take it in as pure as possible. I prefer this method to the method of studying kanji that I've seen/heard for the first time. It is in my opinion a more native approach... and frankly takes less effort.

There are times when I kind of binge and do a lot of studying, times when I kind of do a little a day, and times when I slack off. It still amounts to me being able to read a little bit more each day. I also like to just kind of read documents and copy the kanji I don't know (which is admittedly a lot). I don't expect to learn them just by doing that, but I feel as though it accounts for some of the exposure that I missed out on by not growing up in Japan or as a Japanese.

Of course I don't have grades and tests and all that bogus to worry about, so I don't have to subject myself to the odd order of textbooks/language courses.