Studying Kanji with Furigana helpful or not?

I was wondering if it's pointless to study Kanji with or without Furigana.

Does it only make things harder to forget, do people forget Hiragana and just study Kanji?

I am using a Lietner based JLPT flash card system for the iPhone with the app Japanese.
It allows you to toggle Furigana on or off and I wondered, does Furigana help or just make it difficult?

As some of you are native Japanese I think it would be helpful to ask natives for their opinion :3

What do you think?

Janet Merai said:

I was wondering if it's pointless to study Kanji with or without Furigana.

Does it only make things harder to forget, do people forget Hiragana and just study Kanji?

I am using a Lietner based JLPT flash card system for the iPhone with the app Japanese.
It allows you to toggle Furigana on or off and I wondered, does Furigana help or just make it difficult?

As some of you are native Japanese I think it would be helpful to ask natives for their opinion :3

What do you think?

Click to expand...

I'm Japanese so I don't know exactly how it goes for you but Hurigana did helped me to learn.

The steps I learnt the Chinese characters
1) picking up words by Ear
2) picking up words by reading(using Hurigana)
3) Learning how to read Chinese characters by guessing the words that the characters should denote

So, I learnt the words before how to read Chinese characters
It was a stress free approach and most kids, I believe, learn Chinese characters the same way: Kids read Manga and Books(with or without Hurigana ) and they are practically doing Flash cards without even themselves knowing it.

If I consider learning Chinese Characters only, however, Furigana could get in the way: particularly if you eyes are reading Furigana before Chinese Characters.

Janet Merai said:

study Kanji with or without Furigana.
What do you think?

Click to expand...

Furigana is very helpful, especially in the beginning. When you go to look up a word, having to figure out the reading of the Kanji first can take some time. So keep the furigana on a first. Once you get more confident try reading without.
I find it useful to physically write down new words/kanji in a notebook. That helps me to memorize them. If you don't practice writing new kanji you won't learn them.

Exactly what Ganma said - when you read with furigana you can learn how different characters have different readings. What I usually do is I read with furigana a few times, then when I move onto other sentences, I come back to the original one, cover the furigana up, and see if I can get it right.