Comment by danabramov

This is unnecessarily pedantic advice, and I encourage fellow learners of Japanese to ignore it. You will definitely need to learn hiragana and katakana but you can do it at your own pace, and it is orthogonal to learning the basics of grammar, forming sentences, and pronunciation, so you definitely don't need to think of it as an obstacle. For pronunciation in particular, obviously watching Japanese movies etc helps. And yes, I have a native Japanese teacher who recommends the same.