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WaniKani at least teaches words. Spending almost a year of your life doing nothing other than learning "meanings" of individual Kanji is...well, I guess some people just really get addicted to that mechanical feeling of progress?

Reading is definitely helpful, but I've found the relative importance of reading, listening and speaking goes in cycles, and especially at the early stages, listening and speaking are far more motivating than anything else. And I'm an introvert!

> In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then move on to kanji later. But writing is a very useful tool in learning, and having access to that tool can help speed things up.

There is no connection between these two sentences. You can learn to read and write in Japanese without ever learning a single kanji, and that's what everybody does do. Kana serve the purpose flawlessly.

With 0 kanji, it's such a small subset that it's hard to call that a finished job of learning to read or write as you'll be limited to material like kids books or NHK news easy.

Yes, I ignored Kanji completely while learning Japanese. I only learned words in hiragana and katakana from my SRS decks. I regret it because it locked me out of a lot of comprehensible input I could have used to actually progress in ways apart from learning the sounds of lots of words (even the sounds I learned were often wrong because I never heard anyone speak the words I was learning).

Am I the only one reading this thread and thinking, "Gee, this sounds like a job for AI?"

Why in the world should any human not from Japan devote limited time and brain capacity learning to read and write Japanese? It's literally a robot's job, at this point.

It will take a lot of time for your Japanese language skills to get up to par with robot translation, that is true. It was also arguably true with google translate many years ago too.

But isn't this true for most things? It will take a complete beginner years to draw as technically proficiently as an image generation model, or to code as well as Claude. Even before AI, most Japanese media has been available in English translations for years now, and there aren't that many other interests where you could find Japanese speaking peers but not English speaking ones.

If your goal in life is to generate the most economic value per unit of time input, maybe then learning to draw, code, or speak Japanese no longer makes sense. And if that's your priority, you won't choose to do these things. But that's not why people take up these pursuits. So I don't think AI will have a huge impact on how many people start them.

In an ideal world, some kind soul would escort kanji behind a shed and we'd hear a loud bang, then marvel at how we can suddenly just read words we've heard for years.

Wanikani did add some common hiragana-written words into various levels. Not many, but at least nobody hits 60 without learning これ anymore.