I don't understand this sentiment. Kanji are an integral part of the japanese language, and much of it doesn't make sense without them. You can and should star

I don't understand this sentiment. Kanji are an integral part of the japanese language, and much of it doesn't make sense without them. You can and should start studying kanji as soon as you have a reasonable command of hiragana. Every time you learn a new word you should at least check the characters it's written with instead of pretending that it's okay to use hiragana for everything. My experience has been that I sometimes actually understand words I've never heard before because I can connect the syllables with kanji whose meaning fits the context. It's up to you to balance your time between learning the written language and learning the spoken language, but they are not independent of each other, and ignoring kanji in the beginning is a mistake.