Japanese speakers please: writing?

Question

I've recently started learning Japanese writing and speaking, and i have to wonder, is it really this easy? Pretty much every word or phrase that i have encountered so far in Japanese can be spelled out using Hiragana, and occasionally Katakana if it is a foreign word, so i guess my question is how often to you encounter Kanji? Because i've been reading some Japanese and i have yet to see many of them. Is learning Kanji ABSOLUTELY necessary in reading conversational Japanese?

Help please? =]

Answer 1

A lot.

Look at these pages, there are so many kanji.  You learn 1,945 kanji in school, but most Japanese know more than that.

http://www.yahoo.co.jp

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n08/bkaj/

www.toei-anim.co.jp/tv/kamisama

www1.u-netsurf.ne.jp/~e-emi/ken1.htm

http://msbaby.babymilk.jp/baby-syasinoub...

Answer 2

absolutely necessary

its really childish if there's no kanji in a sentence in japan. same level as japanese 6yrs old kids. even they can write kanji after 6mo of school life.

so you absolutely need to learn kanji if you want to read japanese books or something for more than 6 yrs old.

Answer 3

You have to learn kanji. Hiragana and katakana are fine for beginners and you've probably only been looking at beginner things, but you cannot continue to progress without learning kanji. Kanji helps to make meanings more clear because Japanese has a huge amount of homophones and while you can normally figure it out through context it's just easier (and quicker) to read with kanji. At a native level hiragana is generally only for words never written in kanji and for grammar particles.

If you go to Japan you see kanji everywhere: on menus, on signs, in children's books, et cetera and unless the kanji is particularly rare or if it's meant to also be read by children who may not know the kanji there aren't going to be any furigana above it to tell you how to say it.