Thread:Gsimenas/@comment-213.229.65.182-20160812143216/@comment-6697950-20160812160304

1) From personal experience, I'd say "enough to understand the principles of drawing kanji and be able to redraw unknown kanji to look them up in a dictionary". There's no real point in learning all the kanji before reading novels/manga/etc. in Japanese, as you'll still encounter less common kanji now and then (and novel writers tend to use old/more complicated forms of kanji for certain words...), while on the other hand, you might not encounter certain kanji at all, despite them being considered "common". It's best to just start reading and then look up kanji as you encounter them. Google Translate's drawing tool or say an iPad's Chinese keyboard should be sufficient for finding the kanji by drawing them.

2) I personally read most light novels in English and only read a novel in Japanese if I'm translating it or the English release takes too long. So, I'm currently only reading SAOAGGO and Clover's Regret in Japanese, though I am thinking about reading Progressive too, since waiting nearly a year for Yen Press to translate it is bull****. Reading a novel takes MUCH longer if you're also trying to translate it, so it would be nice to start reading something that I'm not working on.

Anyway, I've long since lost count of the kanji I know. I believe I started reading when I was maybe at around 300. Can't really say for sure, but it definitely wasn't all that much. I had to look up quite a few kanji, but encountering them through practice is an easier way to learn them in my opinion.