Quote:
Originally Posted by KyleGoetz
I'll be honest: One of the biggest failings of Japanese language instruction is waiting too long to introduce kanji. If you know hiragana, learn katakana. If you know both, start kanji immediately.
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While I agree that hiragana → katakana → kanji is the proper path to take for the writing systems... I am a strong believer that no one should be learning kanji for words they do not yet know. You see this all the time, and I think it seriously screws up learning. If you learn the kanji at the same time as both it`s reading and it`s meaning (with the meaning being learnt in another language), you`re shooting yourself in the foot.
I see way too many Japanese learners who may know a bunch of kanji, but they don`t know more than a handful of words. Being able to say "oh, that kanji means such-and-such in English!" is ok for trying to skim over something and getting a very very basic idea of what it could possibly be about... But unless you actually know the proper usages, knowing the meaning isn`t going to help you much.
I say learn hiragana with katakana on the side, and work hard on learning grammar and vocabulary... THEN, and only then, start learning kanji for the stuff you already know. When you are advanced enough that you can learn new kanji you encounter by looking them up in a Japanese language dictionary instead of learning kanji = meaning in English, start learning new ones.
It`s really sad to see learners struggling over memorizing countless kanji when they can`t even make a proper sentence half the time. There are other things that are more important.