I traveled in Japan with friends, and we were all Japanese language learners. We could all read kana, but only I could read kanji, so I took the opportunity to

I traveled in Japan with friends, and we were all Japanese language learners. We could all read kana, but only I could read kanji, so I took the opportunity to evaluate how our experiences differed. In terms of street signage (e.g. train station names, place names, restaurant menus, merchandise shopping), it's very hit-and-miss if you only read kana. Place names are almost always full kanji (especially on maps), but trains and buses usually display the kana version (as well as romaji). Kana will allow you to identify products named with foreign words, as well as some Japanese words that are written in kana for various reasons. Otherwise, any real sentence is written with kanji, with kana only acting as the glue between the substantial words. Bottom line is that if you don't read kanji, you are missing out on a lot of Japanese text. It would roughly be the equivalent of bleeping out every English word that is more than 6 letters long.