I know, we all love kanji/kana here. But I was afraid of it when I started, it seemed like it would literally take me AGES to learn a single word and I just wanted to speed ahead with romaji, to learn japanese by ear which seemed so much more comfortable to me and it'd be like a child learns Japanese in a way. I considered myself an efficient contrarian. I did plan to learn kanji but only when I was very comfortable with listening.
Note: I studied from recordings, didn't actually try to learn romaji words or recognize them but used it only to look up new words.
I study from audiobooks or anime, I used subtitles to look up new words I couldn't recognize by ear.
I would usually just copy and paste kanji into a romaji translator when I have to look for words I can't manage to guess the romaji of to find the translation. Of course those are not very accurate a lot of the time. I believe it may have helped me speed up in the beginning when I was learning basic words.
It might take me a few seconds to translate kanji into romaji, it seemed quick but now I realized it really added up. Being that it wasn't very accurate it would often lead to frustration. Well I was listening to audiobooks or shows I frequently copy and pasted the wrong line from the subtitles and had to go back and find the right one, this was a pain in the neck sometimes.
I've only been studying kanji for 2-3 months now. Even with just a little knowledge I was often able to find the line of the subtitles I was looking for very quickly, and could usually locate the specific word to pop into a translator in a near instant.
Kanji feels like a cheat sheet, and things are just a lot more comfortable. I used to study and get frustrated within an hour, but now I notice I can often go 2-3 hours or more of studying and be fine. If the diologue isn't very clear (super common in most anime) I can actively follow along with the subtitles, even with my crappy few months of practice I still recognize most common words already. No trying to figure out what was said, it's just instant knowledge. Instead of coming across 10-20 new words or phrases, I can easily find 40-50 in a day of studying.
Words seem to stick better because not only does my brain have a sound for that word but it has to remember the kanji, meaning my brain has more connections set up for that word, if it doesn't recognize the sound it'll recognize the kanji and viceversa.
I'm able to see the parts that make up words too which make them a lot easier to conceptualize. I already had guessed many of them myself but some of them are new to me.
Guess I'm posting this to emphasize the importance of kanji, and just if anyone wondered why you shouldn't just try to learn by ear.
by Night_Guest