Literacy is one of the basic tenants of AJATT - you can't truly immerse if you can't read the language. You will miss a lot of the meaning behind words without an understanding of the kanji that compose them, and you won't be able to read a monolingual dictionary without either. There's many more benefits to learning the kanji that all make complete sense to me (in fact it just seems dumb not to) - so many that I'm not even going to bother listing them here.
However learning the kanji as a first step was a little frustrating to accept at first because I just wanted to start learning Japanese! But it has actually become a really fun process, especially when I look back at how many I've already "learned" *finger quotes*. It's going to take time for them to actually mature in my brain, but I've gone through 1000 kanji already - that's a fun thought!
The consensus is that Remembering the Kanji 1 (and 3) by James W. Heisig is the best approach to learning the kanji. So I've been doing that and using Anki as my SRS
I printed all the kanji from RTK 1 and 3 [1] as a poster to pin to my wall.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1Ecpd6Vaml4SlK54bZTpNMgdghcW9kRI5Tqb3kyJUF0eqX3CTlSbhz2Gt4Im99PeHbAuvPGVarIVfXik0bj3Zyrv6A2S59sqqDA-tIzQ7_jBnDLhWj6w8JuJeFpIOEsLw_HLN4kItuuM/s1600/kanji_poster_570.jpg)
As I add kanji to my deck, I highlight them on the poster to show my progress. I've gotten through the first 1000 so far!
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigT7EH3Fe62C7RpFCjWqek1KzplRyrBrEkjm-EGGW-EJ6EiyLiPjiahoK-du6Va0wGG2zESrBx5DX2_c52h1_ieyutvUHPT66pd86IEwhGLEibGLGqXM4S65I-6H5xs4l8MUFHoC8c4-s/s1600/kanji_poster_1k_570.jpg)
[1] The poster that khatzumoto links to in his blog doesn't seem to be available any more. I had to print my own.
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