Well the good news is that the kana are really low hanging fruit. You can learn them in a day and as long as you continue learning Japanese you will be constant

Well the good news is that the kana are really low hanging fruit. You can learn them in a day and as long as you continue learning Japanese you will be constantly exposed to them. There are only just over a hundred of them and, unlike English, they are only ever pronounced one way[0]. Kanji are significantly more effort, with 2k characters to learn and multiple pronunciations for each. Interestingly, while you will probably hate Knaji at first and wonder why they are still used, you will come to appreciate them later as they aid reading by breaking things up[1] and disambiguating between homonyms. [0] Ok, sorry, that was the lies-to-children version. Katakana are only ever pronounced one way. Hiragana has different pronunciation for は and へ when they are used as particles. Also there's pitch accent. [1] Japanese generally doesn't use spaces.