Immersion

Learning a new language isn't easy. New alphabets don't help. Greek and Russian is daunting, but at least the alphabets have a lot of similarities to ours... Japanese is completely new.

For those who don't know, Japanese has 2 alphabets and thousands of kanji characters (chinese imports over the last few millenia...). Each alphabet has 46 (?) unique characters, plus quite a few modified ones. In order to read a newspaper, you will need to know both alphabets, and around 2000 kanji.

Kanji presents a more serious challenge though. Each character has several things needing to be learned:
-its shape
-how it's written
-how many strokes it has (so you can look it up in a dictionary?)
-what it means
-what its readings are (some have loads)
  -On'yomi (chinese readings) there may be variants from different chinese periods!
  -Kun'yomi (native Japanese): Japanese words were written with Chinese characters...

So with all these you need to identify the shape by its sound, and vice versa, and with the kanji you need to know the meaning too.

For a Japanese school kid, this would be spread over 9 years, I've got 9 months, and they have the advantage of speaking Japanese!

I think if I take the approach of dipping in and out, it will take me forever to learn, so I'm going for immersion. Let's hope I don't drown...

First, I want to be able to write in Japanese scripts, so that when I'm learning words I actually learn both. Plus I'll be making a corner of my mind that's entirely Japanese.

Would you go whole hog like this? Or do you think I'm crazy?