(2016-06-13, 2:01 am)pm215 Wrote: I don't think it's a useless skill (quite the opposite), it's more that using RTK just for that seems like overkill, if you're not actually learning to write the characters from memory.It's not easy to determine how time-efficient RTK is compared to other approaches. But in the grand scheme of things, you'll take a LOT of time to learn Japanese no matter what. Whether it was overkill or not, I'm glad I don't have to waste time trying to make sense of most kanji I'll ever encounter.
My main goal was to do that in advance to make my life easier and immersion more fun - most people seem to ignore the latter, which is actually a big deal imo -, and at the end of the day I got what I wanted. Of course, the extra fun is a trade off because you're doing part of the hard work in advance, but I don't think it's a bad idea to get the boring stuff out of the way asap in order to reach a comfortable level where immersion is both viable and enjoyable. No matter how difficult a language is, the whole process only gets easier from there because it's a lot more fun.