I think it’s an OK choice, but it’s really up to you. I would study the kanji at least once simply because it’s a good chance to learn them in context and to reinforce my memory with links to something meaningful (e.g. an event in a textbook story), but if it’s more enjoyable for you to leave the kanji for later, then you can go ahead.
I mean… I guess? In Chinese period dramas, imperial and noble families are also much more formal than commoners are, so that wouldn’t surprise me. But would one need to use a different level of speech in order to convey an apology? I’m not that sure… especially because I’d expect the high status of an emperor to be quite fixed in a traditional context.
I’m actually a bilingual native English and Chinese speaker. My main language is English. I don’t really speak much Chinese to my mum, but her native languages are two Chinese dialects (that aren’t Mandarin), so it wouldn’t be wrong to say that she still has some notions of how people interact in traditional Chinese culture which she has passed on to me. My grandparents are from China, but they travelled to Singapore a really long time ago, probably just after World War II.
It’s true that everyday English in Singapore is quite different from standard English, so I had to spend a lot of time on separating casual, conversational Singaporean English (Singlish) from standard English, but I managed it after a few years of searching and practising as a teenager. (I would check grammar sites every once in a while and read to dictionary in order to fix the minor errors I was still making because they were so common in Singlish.) It’s probably possible to do it more quickly, but if my experience with French and other languages is any indication, what you need to do is to pick a specific model, and then learn to imitate that. (E.g. I refused to translate anything directly from English to French unless there was no other way. Even when I found out that “dans le passé” existed as a valid literal translation of ‘in the past’, I only used “par le passé” for a while because that way, I wouldn’t mix the two up.)
I don’t want to derail the thread too much, but I did explain what I do to learn languages here:
But besides that, what I do a lot of is just breaking things down literally. I strongly believe that meaning comes together in a certain way in native speakers’ heads, even if they’re not conscious of it. That’s the whole reason why we ‘feel’ certain phrases just ‘make sense’ in our native languages. Certain pieces of meaning just ‘ought to’ go together with other pieces. Certain words only describe certain others (e.g. in English, you always ‘make a mistake’; you can’t ‘do a mistake’. In French, however, “faire” is both ‘to do’ and ‘to make’, and that’s the case in other Romance languages – there’s usually just one word that comes from Latin’s facere, and it means both things). Therefore, when I learn something new, I need to understand why it means what it does for a native speaker of that language, or at least how I can understand it.
An example in Japanese would be how people say でんわにでる to mean ‘to answer the phone’. It’s literally ‘to come out/appear on the phone’. I can’t explain exactly why we say this in Japanese, but I can say that it’s as though ‘the phone’ is a place, and it’s almost as though the person on the other end will hear you ‘popping up’ as you answer. I learn the sort of impression each word creates, and bit by bit, I understand how to use it elsewhere as well. I believe in learning to think like a native speaker, even if all I have is my best guesses, and so far, it’s worked pretty well. It’s like making a scientific theory: it doesn’t have to be perfectly true, because we have no way of knowing whether something reflects 100% of reality. (We can’t test absolutely everything: it’s humanly impossible.) However, so long as the theory explains everything we see, and survives every experiment we throw at it, it’s as good as true, and will be very useful for predictions and new applications.