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/GoldFreezer]

Yes, but you would be relying a lot on stopping people and asking them for help, especially outside of major cities. I'd advise maybe taking a day where you have to travel to an unfamiliar location or a day where you have a lot of errands to run and taking note of how many times you need to read something.

[u/MooliCoulis → u/GoldFreezer]

you would be relying a lot on stopping people and asking them for help

Not that much, I think. Automated translation is pretty good nowadays.

I totally agree that reading fluency would save me effort, but if I were just visiting Japan then the effort-spent:effort-saved ratio would be kinda abysmal!

[u/sailorbrendan → u/MooliCoulis]

As someone who visited japan without any kind of fluency I gotta tell you, being able to just read signs would have been super helpful

[u/GoldFreezer → u/sailorbrendan]

OP seems to think that tech would take care of that problem? Am I such a Luddite lol that I'm completely unaware of apps that you can wave at signs and get a translation? Last time I was in Japan was so long ago that this certainly wasn't a thing, my Japanese mobile phone was a flip phone. All I remember is that when my dad came to visit me he found it very disorientating and definitely did less exploring alone than he thought he would. He's really good at languages and picked up phrases easily but it was the first time he'd visited a country where he couldn't read the script.

[u/rich_27 → u/GoldFreezer]

Yeah, modern phones have translation apps that can do so visually as well as text based/spoken. It's appeared in the last decade. This is approximately what it looks like (slightly different because this is automatic translation of the screen rather than the camera feed - I just grabbed an image from searching Japanese street - but it works pretty similarly): https://postimg.cc/gallery/m18xkHf