So...I've just completed my N4 studies recently and will be moving to N3 soon. The thing is I make it a point to revise on my grammar and vocabulary regularly but I have heavily neglected my Kanji ever since I was halfway through N5. I probably only have about a hundred Kanji under my belt at the moment compared to the 300 I should have memorized when I've completed N4.
This being simply because I didn't find Kanji too useful at the point of my studies as I didn't encounter the need to read Kanji very often and neither did I have to use/write it. Even if there's Kanji, there is the Hiragana pronunciation above the words so I never really had a problem with worksheets or revising my notes.
I honestly do spend a huge chunk of my time on my Japanese studies on just Grammar and Vocabulary and I'm really worried I will get screwed later on when Kanji becomes more prominent in the syllabus and stuff. I'm thinking about starting on Kanji practices but depending on how bad of a situation I might be in I will have to adjust how many words I should absorb daily.
I hope some of the more experienced members can share with me their take on the importance of Kanji at the different levels of the JLPT in practice, rather than just the 2000+ Kanji that I should have mastered by the time I get to N1 since I'm pretty sure I won't use atleast half of them for daily speech and stuff.
The last time I studied Kanji, I was near the end of level 3, then got bored and focused on studying vocabulary through translating Japanese text. Though, whenever I'm waiting for someone, the people around me are busy talking on the phone or just have nothing to do, I would open my kanji learning app and try to make my way through level 3.
Kanji is very important, because it teaches you how to pronounce them depending on their position in a word and even guess the meaning of a word you don't know.