ninjazeta45 I actually recently ran into this, too! 🙂 I had a trip to Japan a few weeks ago and discovered that some crucial testing directions were missing for Japanese courses.
I guess this is an area where my assumptions from learning Chinese didn't carry over to other languages.
Chinese courses typically have three columns: Chinese (characters), English, and Pinyin (pronunciation). The typical flow is to learn Chinese -> English and then Chinese -> Pinyin, so one first learns what the Chinese characters mean, then learns how to pronounce them.
I mistakenly assumed that Japanese worked the same way and that Kana was a pronunciation system for Kanji, so the learning flow would be the same as with Chinese: Kanji -> English and then Kanji -> Kana. Once I started trying to learning some Japanese, I discovered that indeed, this isn't the case 🙂
For Japanese, what do you think the ideal learning flow would be?
