I have been self-studying the Japanese language for about a year now. It has been a hard road so far. I am studying with the goal to speak read and write Japanese. So far I have memorized 40-60 of the JLPT4 kanji and have a good memorization of the kanas, this has been slowing my learning of the Japanese language as a whole down considerably. I enjoy learning the kanji and consider it a great enhancement to anyone studying Japanese. My question is: "is it all that important to learn kanji at the same time as the spoken language, or am I better off just getting a grip on the spoken language, and then moving on to learning the written kanji?"