Japanese Students/Fluents, Give me Your Advice!

Supposedly, don't learn Kanji until you have a good grasp of vocabulary in general, because it'll only confuse you more.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Well, without experience there's very little way of knowing how to read a certain Kanji, even if you know the readings. As Enkidu pointed out, there are multiple readings for each Kanji, and most sites don't exactly give you lists of circumstances in which x reading is used.

Doesn't really affect me though, I'm trying to learn Korean >_>

How ya doing, buddy?

From what many expats living in Japan say, it's not even the Kanji that proves to be the biggest problem, it's the grammar. Kanji seems to be the biggest hump at first, but really, it's not.

I mean, in just over a week of studying, I had over 100 Kanji memorized, which I retained for a couple of months. I lost interest though, and my sources were somewhat limited or even inaccurate. It's as simple as memorizing 10 a day. BUT. That doesn't mean you can read them in context, understand their jukogu, use them properly in a sentence, or understand the meaning as quickly as you would in English.

Basically, it's both easy and hard. That's just Kanji, not to mention the grammar, and vocabulary. If someone says they're fluent in Japanese, or almost any language for that matter after doing 3 years of independent study, I call BS. Even for the most adept person, it takes years of dedication, practice, experience, and boredom (because no matter how interested you are, it will be boring at points) to become fluent, if even that. There are tons of people who do a degree in Japanese, go to Japan, and find they have no actual grasp of the language.

More power to whoever can stick through with it, though.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.