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.
Like most things in life, a balanced approach is probably the right one. But you have to know what your goal is. Our brains are lazy, they only get better at what we make them get better at. If your goal is to just read kanji, practice reading kanji. If your goal is to understand and speak the language, practice listening to and speaking the language. But if you want to have a balanced language ability, you'll need to practice it all.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Heisig says in the introduction to RTK I that he learned 1900 characters "before the month was out". If like him you can do the whole set in a month and then have no further need of formal review or study beyond using them as they turn up, then I can see it not being a terrible idea. But as far as I can tell, almost nobody has a mind that works like Heisig's does: people seem to need longer and to rely more on review via an SRS like Anki.
Personally I found my problem with RTK was that I successfully memorised "English keyword to write the character" for 2000 kanji, but this was not at all linked to my actual use of the language, so I still had the problem I started with of "I want to write the word べんきょう but can't bring to mind the kanji for it", because I had no association between Japanese words and the English keywords for their component kanji...
If you didn't know what べんきょう meant, how did you know it was what you wanted to write?
(Here べんきょう is just an example: the same issue applies to essentially every word.)
The kanji are pictographic characters that often have different pronunciations in different contexts. The kanji for べんきょう are 勉強 (meaning "to study").
In your model of the problem, pm215 knows the following things:
1. There is a Japanese word pronounced benkyoo which refers to activities like reading books with the intent to learn something, doing practice exercises with the intent to learn something, preparing to take a test, doing things that a school might ask you to do, and other similar endeavors.
2. There is an English word "study" which corresponds to the Japanese word spelled 勉強.
But he doesn't know this:
3. In English, activities performed with the intent to learn or review something are referred to by the general term "studying".
I find this hard to believe. Anyone who chose to learn mappings from English words to kanji spellings must be familiar with the meanings of basic English words. He shouldn't be able to think of the activities he wants to refer to without the word "study" coming into his mind, but that was the problem he described.
This is analogous to "I want to write an English sentence, but I can't remember how to spell one of the words", except it's worse because at least English words are spelled vaguely in line with their pronunciation.
I think where I may have stated the problem confusingly was my reference to not having a link between the Japanese word and the English RTK keywords. RTK assigns one unique keyword to each kanji, which (a) doesn't always line up with the meaning of a word in which it's the only kanji and (b) doesn't inherently help with multi kanji words. In this case benkyou is 勉強 which is two kanji with the RTK keywords EXERTION and STRONG. Unless you actively learn and memorise a link between the Japanese word and this pair of keywords, RTK is not going to help you with writing the word.
Ah, you're right. I had no idea this was what you had in mind. That is a system that doesn't make sense. You have to learn the spelling of words per word, not hope that the roots make sense.
(By contrast, 勉强 exists in modern Chinese too, where it mostly means "force; coerce; compel", but can also refer to just barely being able to do something. I was amused to see that it means "study" in Japanese - that implies one of the most sharply negative attitudes towards studying that I've ever heard of.)
I do imagine someone dedicated would be able to pull that off. But that's still 3-4 hours per day, I guess?
But the reason for that is that I was learning Chinese. I spent zero effort on learning any characters preliminary to that. There is no reason you'd need or want character knowledge.
My character knowledge is decent now, because eventually my learning method became "talk with Chinese people over Wechat", and if you do that you will necessarily learn common characters.
If one's mother tongue isn't Chinese/Japanese, I guarantee you that's impossible to understand kanji/hanzi as deeply as a native speaker does just by spending 17 months on memorizing how to write them. It simply never happens. Languages come first and writing systems come later no matter which target language you're trying to acquire.
Even native speakers get confused about their own writing systems. It's vs its. Should've vs should of. Doppelganger vs doppleganger. Being able to wield the writing system like a wordmaster is a big plus and a praiseworthy effort. But it really isn't the essence of language acquisition.
While you're still picking up grammar it makes more sense to just pick up kanji here and there as you encounter them.
In general I just do not get the mnemonic approach. It's literally another layer of stuff to recall that frequently doesn't have anything to do with the meaning, and the book I had even connected mnemonics in simpler characters to build into more complex ones. Worst of all, you're learning to identify characters with a bunch of word association in English.
Instead of treating chinese characters as a bunch of "tangled squiggles" that you have to memorize or make up stories about you could just ...learn the radicals (called bushi in Japanese). There are around 230 of them, and they are fundamentally pictographic, so the meaning and appearance are linked. Every kanji character is either a radical itself or made up of other radicals, like a word spelled in two dimensions. Some are used much more than others so most of the time you'll be combining the same 32 simple ones. Once you get familiar with them kanji become much easier to remember; a character that is made up of 10 strokes like 勉 is actually made up of just 4 parts which are just a few strokes each. In some cases you can even guess the meaning of a kanji character you've never seen before by looking at the components, but even where you can't, being able to see a complex character as just a collection of familiar simpler chunks makes everything way easier.
You can find a kanji radicals deck on Ankiweb and it's small enough to do alongside your vocabulary or listening practice without being a burden. It will induce a little cognitive dissonance because a few very familiar characters have different meanings in their radical form but you will get over that soon enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_freq... is a great reference, both for the frequency and the simpler table of stroke count. The individual radical pages have additional detail tracing each one back to bone script (the oldest system of writing, etching characters on bones) which make the pictorial evolution very clear.
By the way, a book I do recommend is the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary by Jack Halperin. This too uses its own schema for looking things up, but it's a simple one, based on the shape (left-right/ top/bottom/ nested/ freestanding) and the number of strokes, which makes looking things up fast. It also contains indexes to look up kanji by radical or pronunciation (eg if you have the furigana) so you are not locked into one way of understanding them like mnemonics. It also has common vocabulary that uses the kanji, stroke order, and all that good stuff. And it has a good reference on the rules of stroke order. There are only 8 of them and (like radicals) once you understand the underlying principle you can look at a new kanji you've never seen before and have a pretty good idea of how to write it. You should still check while you're learning, but the more you write the easier it gets.
jisho.org is also incredibly useful, because you can dig into any word to find the kanji within, and then dig into individual kanji to see which radicals they're composed of, as well as looking things up by radical.
It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards.
As a partial aside, the Heisig anecdote that leads off this piece is painful:
> Japanese children learn the spoken language first, then they learn how to write it in elementary school; Chinese students of Japanese (who tend to be pretty good at it) have pre-existing knowledge of character meanings and forms from their mother tongue, so they only have to learn how to pronounce them. Therefore, a Western learner should first focus only on the meaning and writing of those couple of thousand common characters and, only after having mastered those, should move on to studying the pronunciations.
Going from "Japanese people learn the spoken language first" to "you should spend a big chunk of time learning characters before learning sounds, words or grammar" is a pretty remarkable mental backflip.
The author says he spent eleven months doing this before devoting any time to the spoken language. If I could put the "head exploding" emoji here, I would do it. I spent only slightly more time than that at language school, and came out conversational.