I haven’t had any time to learn this week, but I did try to watch news in my target language. Understood 20% for sure and the rest, well not so sure about the rest.
Also: sorry for not replying to your messages lately in weekly threads. I read them all, but get caught up with holiday stuff before I can properly write an answer.
Finally moving onto N4 and thank god my book now fully uses kanji instead of writing them in hiragana. N5 took me way too long. I tried to learn all the words in kanji even if they aren’t written in one because I figured it’s just delaying the inevitable, but it slowed things to a crawl.
Yeah, there’s a tension there between legibility and moving things along and picking up kanji you’ll need eventually, and ultimately I think it’s about whatever gets you studying more, not necessarily studying optimally. Even some N5 words have kanji that are technically N1/N2 level.
The best textbooks/Anki decks for me strike a balance, where they put emphasis on the most common kanji or kanji that get used in a lot of compounds, and then go kana-only or furigana for the rest.