And to add to that, the post referred to NHK News Easy, which is the simplified Japanese version of regular NHK articles.
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Hi AlyLala (and anyone else who’s still interested at this point in a direct reply to the OP)…
I’m going to be a bit contrarian to most of the advice (given that I’m merely level 13 at this point, but I’m also learning Japanese at my university, where the emphasis is much more heavy on grammar than learning kanji) and say, “It depends.”
Kanji is a large part of the vocabulary that fits into the grammar of the Japanese language. At the end of the first semester of a two-semester accelerated language course, I appreciate kanji more because even authors of Japanese light novels bank on the fact that most Japanese readers don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of kanji (just like English speakers don’t really have an encyclopedic knowledge of all English words), and they regularly use hiragana for long strings of words in sentences where I feel kanji ought to be. Frankly, with or without WK around to memorize kanji, knowing any kanji at all is more useful, more often than not.
As well, there was a portion of my class where I had to interview real live Japanese college students. Again, kanji isn’t everything, but knowing enough kanji to determine, “Well, naturally they mean [a] instead of [b], which sounds the same, but [b] makes no sense in this context,” was useful.
So, as to, “When does this get useful?” It depends. My goal is reading and writing and speaking at a grade-school level before May 2021, so WaniKani is already useful, but it’s also just part of my daily learning diet, along with quizzing myself on grammar and reading manga and light novels out loud. I’m only level 13, but I can write and speak way, way better than I could if I just memorized kanji by itself.
Hope this helps someone.
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