How long did it take you to learn kanji?

I started taking Japanese at university last fall. At first, I tended to brush off the kanji we learned, thinking that it was too daunting of a task and not worth the bother. Around the beginning of the year, I decided to get serious about the written aspect of the language, because being illiterate is no fun. As of now, I can recognize (but definitely not write) about 800. I’ll soon be done with the thousand or so needed for the JLPT 2 test and hope to double that by the end of the year with all of the joyo kanji.

Once I got the hang of making up mnemonics, it really hasn’t been all that bad, although a big time commitment for sure. So how long did it take you to learn kanji? Can you also write, or just read? And would 2000 be enough to get by in Japan?

I’ve forgotten what I used to rough estimate I knew. ~2000 maybe?

I can read and I can type, but I can’t handwrite.

I studied the spoken language + hiragana and katakana for a year, then flew to Japan. After maybe six months I decided to start working on that reading thing, so I would take manga and just look up every word laboriously. After making it through Akira like that, I’d memorized enough words in kanji that I could start reading other works without having to look up so many words. Within another 6 months to a year I was probably able to read most manga without a dictionary.

Unfortunately, I got good enough at reading manga that I got out of the habit of looking stuff up, so when I went to advance to the next stage (reading books), I could sort of guess my way through, but it was really mentally tiring and I’d lose track of where I was. I did actually read a few novellas, but they were more on the light reading end of the spectrum.

Overall, I’d say that took about 3-4 years.

For work, I had to read patent applications in Japanese. About all that can be said of that experience is that they aren’t any more legible to Japanese people than to you.

I don’t know how long it took my daughter, but she is self-taught. She bought and used Pimmsleur (sp?) tapes, using them at home and in her car. She bought workbooks, and made flash cards. She reads manga (and watches anime, too) in Japanese. I think that the flash cards really helped her, but she is dedicated to learning the language.