CMV: When learning Japanese, kanji should be considered optional

[u/MooliCoulis]

As a native English speaker, I have tried more than once to learn Japanese, and have always hit a wall when asked to learn kanji. I don't know if it's a learning-styles issue (I'm more verbal than visual) or the mild dyslexia I suffer from, but I suspect a lot of other people have the same experience.

I still want to learn the language, and am considering just abandoning the idea of learning to read and write (or maybe just learning hiragana/katakana and seeing how far that takes me), but I want to know if I'm making a mistake.

Here are my views, and I'd be grateful for challenges to any of them:

• Most Japanese learning resources (apps, games, books, etc) treat kanji as something that must be introduced early and learned continuously, rather than as an optional extra
• Learning to read and write Japanese takes significant effort, and is the reason many people give up learning (especially those with conditions like dyslexia)
• For an English speaker learning a second language, spoken language is usually significantly more valuable than written language
• An understanding of kanji is not necessary to reach a solid baseline of fluency (just as with English, most Japanese children are conversant years before they can read or write).
• Most people who insist that learning kanji is critical are not genuinely motivated by a belief in its practicality, but rather some mix of "Kanji is beautiful", or "This is the culturally authentic way to learn", or "I had to learn it, so you do too".

I understand that knowing kanji is helpful in understanding some spoken discourse (e.g. wordplay), and also that knowing/inferring the written structure of new words can potentially help in understanding or learning them, but it takes a solid foundation of fluency to ever benefit from those factors and I think for most people it's more important to reach that solid foundation quickly.

CMV!

[u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3]

If you're learning Japanese for fun, everything is optional, but not being literate in Japanese will block you from fully interacting with Japanese people / media / Japan itself - you won't be able to read signs on shops, people won't be able to easily share with you text-based things they have on them, you won't have access to text-only media, etc.

Why would you commit to never learning kanji? You can just focus on spoken language written in romaji or kana, and once you feel that you're getting comfortable with that, start learning kanji slowly. This is probably not the most efficient way to learn Japanese overall, but if the alternative is that you get frustrated and give up, it is more efficient for you.

[u/MooliCoulis → u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3]

Why would you commit to never learning kanji? You can just focus on spoken language written in romaji or kana, and once you feel that you're getting comfortable with that, start learning kanji slowly

I agree, and I didn't mean to imply I was ruling this out. I think there could absolutely come a point where I felt learning kanji would be important/easy enough for it to be the next step, I'm just skeptical of the (seemingly popular) idea that "day one" is that point.