I’ve been learning Chinese for a few years. I’d recommend taking the time to learn the radicals as well, as it will help you get the feeling for what the character might mean, to the point that eventually through context and the radicals used it becomes useful to understand what it means even when you don’t actually know the character.
It also makes it easier to learn characters: Yesterday I learned the character 祂 while reading about Buddhism. It means “it”, but when referring to a god, which I could infer from the context, but also from the fact that 他 means “he” (with a person radical 人）, and 她 means “her” (with a female radical 女）， and I’m familiar with the radical for god/temple which is 礻.
In Chinese this also helps with “guessing” how the character should be pronounced, to an useful extent, but I don’t know if this also would apply for Japanese.
