My sensei told me 9000 kanji characters was the bare minimum :>>>>> killme
(S)he may be screwing with you. The JLPT1, for all its flaws, actually tests reading comprehension, Kanji usage, and grammar well afaik and requires only about 2,000 Kanji/10,000 words to pass. There are just over 2k "Joyo Kanji" (regular use Kanji) according to Japan's ministry of education, and with only 1,903 of the most commonly used Kanji, you can hit approx 95% reading comprehension for typical reading needs. The most common 90,000 words in Japanese only use combinations of 4,606 Kanji, thus about 5k will cover most anything the average person needs. I can believe 9,000 if you want to read classical Japanese literature, but not for pop literature or functional literacy.
With all that said, you should focus on learning how to derive, recognize, and use vocabulary instead of hitting a "Kanji threshold." By the time you hit 2,000 Kanji, you should gain sufficient recognition ability to figure out what several others mean without having to dedicate time to learning them. Focus on that rather than hitting a word count, and you'll be amazed how many words you can figure out without having to memorize them. I learned that lesson with Arabic: by learning base words, you can use that to figure out tons of other vocabulary. That is why the other Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian) and Indo-European Languages(German, Farsi) are so easy compared to Semitic, or East Asian languages. If someone listed 10 random French words, the average English speaker could correctly guess about 6/10 just because of how similar they are to English words.
You have to build that same word recognition with a completely new writing and grammar system. It will take time, and you'll have to learn enough vocab to do this; but always try to figure out what a word means based on its similarity to others you know. If you use blind memorization with Semitic or Oriental languages, you're going to have a bad time.
and I don't think Japan is moving away from kanji anytime soon.
Last I heard, many were moving away from it. Japanese students stop learning Kanji in their public education at the Middle School level. Granted, that's only the regular-use characters, but the fact that university students don't learn it unless they need to for technical terms in their field tells it is in the process of phasing out in lieu of Hira/Kata. I was wrong once though, so it could theoretically happen again. :p
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