I just finished my 2nd semester of Japanese so I can give my experience as a beginner student. Kanji was introduced to the class based on the textbook Modern Japanese Han, 3rd Edition

http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Japanese-3r...1878463098

(I don't recommend the book...riddled with romaji). Actually, I don't even recommend (if using this textbook) to use the entire book into 3 semesters like my school does. Especially since the author intended it to be a 2 semester (for college; 2 years for high school) book.

This is the order the kana and kanji was introduced to us:

Jp 101Kana: Hiragana @ Lesson 4 and katakana @ lesson 8

Jp 101 KanjiLesson 10-13) learned 30 kanji

Jp 102 Kanjilesson 14-20) 48 kanji (+ 30 = 78 total)

(Haven't taken the course but my 102 teacher teaches upper level classes) In Jp 103 the rest of the kanji in the book with a grand total of 162.

Pretty much the progression was based on vocab we learned from romaji --> kana --> kanji (ex. ichi --> いち -->　一　)

I took 2 years of Japanese when I was in high school. I don't think I could of had less efficient way of learning characters. We learned only Hiragana at the beginning of the the first semester of the first year, and we didn't touch Katakana until the beginning of the second semester. By the end of the first year I don't think we learned any more than 20 kanji, and they were really basic ones (numbers and a few others like 人 and 日). We actually didn't detach from romanji until the second year, romanji was still slapped under katakana words for the whole second semester. (cake written as "KEEKI" etc. Imagine what kind of habits that might have gave to a student). At the end of the second year (let me remind you that's two years) we probably had a little under a hundred down. I forgive the class in thinking maybe it was more focused on speaking rather than reading and writing, but even then even the good students weren't able to construct simple sentences from the top of their head (except for this one Korean guy that lived in Japan for two years and this one other guy that had a Japanese mother).

This was back when I didn't really care about learning Japanese, so I didn't leave feeling too disappointed, but since I began studying on my own I realize how inefficient it was. I'm glad I learned about RTK and the huge amount of language communities and resources online.

Jombo Wrote:We learned only Hiragana at the beginning of the the first semester of the first year, and we didn't touch Katakana until the beginning of the second semester. By the end of the first year I don't think we learned any more than 20 kanji, and they were really basic ones (numbers and a few others like 人 and 日). We actually didn't detach from romanji until the second year, romanji was still slapped under katakana words for the whole second semester.

Ugh, I hated the way katakana gets taught. When I was in high school I did Japanese via correspondence for two years because we didn't have a class at my school. The text books I used were made by the correspondence school and were actually pretty good. The first thing we did was hiragana which was introduced at quite a nice pace and the romaji disappeared for each hiragana moji after we learned it. But then they introduced katakana. It was "and here are all the katakana. Go learn them". Needless to say I couldn't read katakana till the end of the two year course (and I still occasionally make mistakes).

We didn't really get taught much kanji, but for NSW's Japanese beginner course you're not expected to know that many. So I guess one can only blame the state for lack of kanji.