It depends on what your goal is. Kanji is the building block, and to be honest, it makes reading and writing a lot easier. At least it feels that for me, and I'm only just learning. Compared to seeing sentences formed in all-hiragana, it's harder to separate them into chunks. Whereas if they are written in kanji, I can immediately see the sentence structure better. Like say, you want to travel and if you're traveling for a short term, then I suggest learning just the most essential kanji so you can recognise things like 入り口, 出口, 大、小、etc. As far as being understood is concerned, I don't think native Japanese speakers will have a difficulty deciphering you :) but my suggestion is to dive right into kanji as soon as you have nailed down hiragana and kanji. Do you know a site called WaniKani? It's a site that aims specifically to help you remember kanjis. Instead of thinking which kanjis are easy to memorise, think of which kanjis you ought to memorise, no matter how complicated they are. This way, the feeling of reward is much more immense and practical as you'll be able to read and recognise common words.