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Kanji are an element of the Japanese language that some learners love, and others hate. Strictly speaking, you can develop a fair degree of proficiency in spoken Japanese without ever delving into the kanji. A number of Japanese learning tools on the market today do not even attempt to teach any of the several thousand Sino-Japanese characters employed in the language. Since the phonetic structure of Japanese is fairly limited, and can be reproduced with tolerable accuracy via roomaji ローマ字, it is fair to ask, "why bother?"—especially if your focus is spoken Japanese.
I could point out that without the kanji, you will miss out on the fascinating world of the Japanese printed media, including the novels of Natsume Soseki, and the latest copy of AERA or the Daily Yomiuri. Although these points are valid, neither is the primary reason why I am going to advocate that you learn to love the kanji—if you have not already developed such an affection.
A primary usefulness of the kanji involves vocabulary acquisition. In secondary school, most of us were drilled on the Greek and Latin roots. For example, from the Latin root word mar, the English words "maritime", "submarine", and "mariner" are derived. From the Greek khronos, we get "chronic", "chronology", "synchronous", etc.. Of course it is possible to memorize these words without knowing that mar means "sea" or that khronos means "time". However, when you come across an unfamiliar word, such as "chronometry", your knowledge of the Greek and Latin roots will save the day. If you can recognize the presence of khronos and metron, then you can guess that the word "chronometry" has something to do with measuring time, even if you have never seen the word before.
In Japanese, a knowledge of the kanji provides a similar benefit in the acquisition and recognition of new words. Consider the following word from the field of avionics:
後退翼
Unless you work for the Japanese affiliate of Boeing or Airbus, you have probably never seen this word before.
However, if you know the kanji contained within, you can add up the individual meanings to arrive at a guessable composite meaning:
Kanji
Pronunciation
Meaning
後
koo
"rear"
+
退
tai
"withdrawl", "recede"
+
翼
yoku
"wing"
With a bit of extrapolation, (and a basic knowledge of airplanes), we can guess that the meaning of kootaiyoku後退翼is "backswept wing". Moreover, think about how much easier it will be to remember the word based on your knowledge of its etymological components, versus just trying to memorize that the syllables "kootaiyoku" mean "backswept wing".
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In many cases, the kanji composite words are much easier to memorize than their English equivalents. Take the word:
昆虫学
konchuu-gaku
If you recognize the word konchuu 昆虫, which means "insect", and the character gaku 学, which as a suffix denotes "a field of study", then you will have no trouble concluding that konchuu-gaku 昆虫学means "the study of insects", or "entomology". You might note that the word "entomology" is more difficult to commit to memory than konchuu-gaku昆虫学–once you know the kanji.
One good vocabulary-building technique is to begin with a root word or kanji, then build a list of related words. For example, if you learn the word for "spider" (kumo 蜘蛛), then you can acquire related words such as "spider crab" (kumo-gani 蜘蛛蟹 ) or "spider web" (kumo no su蜘蛛の巣) at a substantial discount.
