My Japanese so far, any advice?

Hi, my Spanish lessons in school are finally over this year, so now I have moved over to the language I really wanted to learn - Japanese
I've been studying on my own since September, I'm not sure what progress rate I'm having exactly but it's OK as I have no time limit. I won't be taking any trips to Japan for at least 5+ years so it doesn't matter all that much I guess.
What I'm focusing on is a grammar book (Genki), a picture dictionary (with 1500 daily things) and Remembering the Kanji by James W. Heisig. Now what I wanted to ask is what you think of my learning balance. At first I was thinking not to learn kanjis, as it seemed time consuming and not usefull for speaking japanese. But as I tried Heisigs book + the repetition program Anki, I realized it won't be that hard after all, and shifted my attention mostly over to kanjis (I know 700 already). I know some critisize the book as not teaching them "properly", but I've found that I can actually write these kanjis (not neccesarily pretty) from the remembering techniques, and after a while you start to remember them normally (as in not from sick stories) so I'd say there's no problem.
So in the end, although I know many kanjis, I don't know what so many of them actually means in spoken Japanese yet. but what I'm thinking is, it's probably just as fine as first learning Japanese words, then their kanjis; it should just be the other way around. As for the picture dictionary I know maybe 200-300 words from it, though I probably have spent just 10 hours on it. Grammar is something I've read a little, probably as much as the picture dictionary, and I know some basic stuff and some less basic stuff halfway. I'm thinking not to focus so much on the grammar directly; as I listen alot to spoken japanese in animees, it should develop by time. Also my prononciation seems OK beause of this. And when I know the 2000 kanjis, I'll have more time to focus on the other stuff.
So as you can see, I myself is confident in how this is going, so what I'm asking is, if anyone have any doubts about it? Is there something important I'm forgetting?

Seems OK to me overall. Do you know the kana? If you do, I'd suggest adding some reading to that. Or if you could get some anime subtitled in Japanese that would be great too. Or do both.

By the way, I used Heisig's book too and liked it a lot.

I learned hiragana with Anki, though I haven't trained any at the other alphabet for english words, I just know a few of them. It took me about 5 hours with hiragana, I should probably do the other one soon (I thought at first that an alphabet for just foreign words wouldn't be that important to know, wrong... it's everywhere)

Now I set me keyboard to swith to japanese with ctrl+shift+2, and so if I write "watashi ha genki desu" it turns automaticly into わたしはげんきです。(Or 私は元気です。 if I press space, not sure if those two last kanji are right though.) This would be usefull if it worked the other way (writing kanji, then turning it into hiragana)

Though I saw some sites that had kanji readings, I have them bookmarked. Also the picture dictionary have kanji for some words, so I've learned some words so far.
Here is a few...
Natsu － なつ － 夏
Fuyu － ふゆ － 冬
Ki － き － 木
Pond － いけ － 池
Miharu － みはる － 見張る (don't know the second kanji here...)

Btw, I notised some kanjis are very hard to see on computers as the text is too small, anyone else having this problem? If you're really good you'll probably know from the context I guess, but I assume most japanese people are zooming in their browsers, correct?

KHRZ said:

Btw, I notised some kanjis are very hard to see on computers as the text is too small, anyone else having this problem? If you're really good you'll probably know from the context I guess, but I assume most japanese people are zooming in their browsers, correct?

Click to expand...

Most natives/those who are familiar with kanji and/or Japanese recognize it from the context. So, even if the kanji is wrong, they would be able to guess the correct one.

Need a word or phrase translated? | Japan Forum

KHRZ said:

This would be usefull if it worked the other way (writing kanji, then turning it into hiragana)

Click to expand...

There are a number of websites that claim to do this; for example:

Autogenerate furigana over Japanese - Tatoeba
http://nihongo.j-talk.com/kanji/

I wouldn't be confident that these are 100% reliable, though, because knowing which reading to choose can require an understanding of meaning that I don't think these programs possess.

Also, of course, you can use a dictionary like the excellent one at

WWWJDIC