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After doing like two years of it in college, I can tell you that learning Japanese is kind of a nightmare after a while.
Hiragana / Katakana isn't so bad, but when you get into Kanji you're basically learning vocabulary along with symbols at the same time, and you're expected to learn a ridiculous amount of them. By the time high schoolers graduate in Japan, they know an average of about 10,000 words and symbols, some of which have several meanings, just like they do in English. Pair that with having to speak all of it fluently as well, and it kind of makes your brain melt after so long.
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Yeah, on my road to fluency I completely omitted learning Kanji at all. I had a background in Mandarin Chinese so that really helped when I got to that bridge, but even then, Kanji is mostly comprised of the traditional Chinese characters while the Mandarin I learned was mostly in simplified.
But yeah, I didn't even touch Kanji until I was confident with going an entire day around my Japanese friends, not even using English to think or correct myself.
If anyone's still looking to learning any language, I really, really suggest any material by Benny Lewis (from his. TED Talks to his novels or blog). It's immensely helpful, and I definitely would have just stuck to textbooks and called it quits a few weeks in if not for him.