It's even more interesting from the perspective of a non-native english speaker who learned reading and speaking (english) in a mixed fashion. From my personal experience my quickest progress was not made during the systematic learning from school/univ etc, where grammar / structures were taught, but rather from watching movies/conversation/gaming etc. In those scenarios I didn't "need" to have a concrete understanding of the precise meaning. A very vague and abstract idea is more than enough to complete my correct task, may it be gaming/understanding plots/clue-finding etc. In the next occurrence, I simply "interpolate", or more like filling blanks with equally vague words. As time goes by it just gets more accurate, even without understanding the concept precisely.
I really like this progressive interpolation idea... it fits well with my mental model of learning to read Japanese (as a native English speaker). I used a mnemonic technique to quickly learn the general meaning and proper writing of all ~2000 common use kanji. It’s like a medical student memorizing anatomy—no real understanding of the practical significance, just associating a name with something. However, as it turns out this process creates something like a mental scaffolding which makes it much faster to learn new words and their nuances of meaning because that information can “attach” to an existing knowledge structure.
Yep, you always attach new knowledge to old one, and refining old one. That’s why learning Chinese after Japanese is not confusing but quite easy: you can reuse a lot of previous knowledge. In the same way, learning kanji is learning morphemes so the more you know, the more easier it is to learn new words.
