これはなんですか？

So, that's my learning for today. And vocabulary like: こどもたち, うま, いぬ...

It's something. It's hard as nails to write the words down, that's for sure :P

I also must add that learning the stroke oreder is essential. It makes memorizing easier and teaches the proper way to draw a character.

There's Japanese videos on Youku? I thought that it was a Chinese site?

For those not interested in calligraphy, I honestly wouldn't stress stroke order for individual characters that much. If you learn the radicals properly, you will know their stroke order and thereby be able to write large complicated characters correctly for the most part, just remember the golden rule "Top to bottom, left to right" and it's easy. I didn't pay any attention to stroke order before taking a calligraphy class at my Japanese high school. Each to their own though, whatever works for you is best :)

It is a Chinese site, but they really like both Japanese TV and pirating, so there's a huge amount of Japanese TV and movies on there.

I'm with Polyglot, even if you don't write much learning stroke order definitely helps cement the kanji in your mind. Knowing the radical's stroke order makes learning new big kanji lightning if it's just made up of 3/4 radicals you already know and know how to write.

If you (or anyone) can think about someone that had a significant boost to reach fluency by learning stroke order (except for natives), I'd be interested. If not... with due respect, I'd go as far as to say it's bullshit.

I spent quite a long time studying japanese, I've been working in Japan for 4 years, and I think the most difficult thing in japanese is the massive amount of vocabulary (1), the difficulty to remember it (2), and the fact that most of the meaning is conveyed by it (3).

(1) An English native graduate knows 20.000 words of English, a native Japanese graduate knows 40.000 Japanese words. Twice as much is really a lot more (it's certainly not a linear difficulty), but I think the difference is even bigger for the basic (everyday) vocabulary.

(2) a - 22 phonemes versus 36 in English, 37 in French, so a massive amount of words sounds like each other. b -  at least 2000 kanji versus 26 caracters. c - no passive vocabulary or basic understanding the way you have from a latin language to another, or from anything to English.

(3) A very simple grammar, a lot of sentences without subject, or (significant) verbs. And the tacit understanding (以心伝心). Every word count.

I think I got a very basic understanding of Japanese after 2000 words, a level good enough to start working, make me understood in basic conversations after 8000 words, and currently some kind of fluency with 18.000 words (if I read a book there is a word I don't know every 2 pages, it happens - rarely - I don't know how to say something). 18.000 words means 7 words new words every single day for the last 7 years.

So you have to spend a massive of time on that, you have to get a massive exposure, and that requires activities that :
- are enjoyable for years
- are possible in a train, in toilets, for 5 minutes, at lunch break, when you are tired or drunk, or have to be done
- benefit each others. For example, you read wikipedia, that gives you vocabulary to learn. Learning this vocabulary makes your reading faster and easier, so you get more vocabulary, etc.
- natural or necessary. Like "you need to be able to speak or to understand". It's natural to listen to music in the train.
- efficient and simple, like exposure to real Japanese, or 2 clicks in anki

So, that's what you get from watching drama (with japanese subtitles), listening to music (with lyrics), podcasts, reading manga, books, wikipedia with rikaichan, doing work, learning with anki (this one is a must), doing games, having a discussion. And that's what you don't get from stroke order. It's slow, you need focus, it's not necessary, other activities will not reinforce it, and as far as I'm concerned it's not fun.

Actually we have 52 characters considering the capital letter of each form. So learning it is like learning Hiragana or Katakana. But reading Hiragana and Katakana is much easier than english with it being fully phonetic. Just because someone learns english doesn't mean they can read 'Phone' and know what says, or 'That' 'Pterodactyl' 'Name' etc, we have a million and 1 rules for reading, for natives it's fine but It'd say by the time you can read english fluently you'd know 2000 kanji doing a bit everyday.

It was my overall opinion about the efficiency of learning stroke order for western people, when the real challenge is to learn vocabulary. So the way I put "26 versus 2000" seems like a comparison, but I mean remembering words that are a combination of  2000 kanji is a magnitude harder than to learn another set of rules for the same limited, life long known set of characters.

I learned both English and Japanese, and as a french guy I can tell you learning English spelling was effortless (even if my level is not very high). For example, "pterodactyl". In French, we say "pterodactyle", because dinosaur names are common in most western languages, and anyway there is this greek feeling that make the spelling pretty straight forward. "pterodactil" or "Pterodhactil" would make your eyes bleed.   And what about "Phone" ? The word is learned for free, even if it was not in iPhone, anyone knows it even before learning English, and even it was not the case... french say "telephone" and german say "telefon". Learn 電話, that's a whole new world.

Also, your comparison about reading English/Japanese has a fundamental flow. When you talk about English, in fact you talk about getting the right pronounciation from your reading of words. When you talk about reading Japanese, you don't talk anymore about words nor about their pronounciation... you just talk about understanding the characters (kanji) in themselves. Just understanding the characters in English is free. Only 26 and I already knew them.

And for details,  compared to 26 kanji to learn, learning capital letter is like getting used to another font. I mean... Vv, Xx, Yy, Mm, Tt, Ss... 漢字！

I was more thinking of the perspective of a 日本語の人 learning english. Not a person with a roman/german native tongue :) 

In this perspective I agree. It's very hard for Japanese people to get spelling and pronounciation. I even have the impression that a lot of Japanese can't see a mispel, something similar to dislexia, perhaps because they are used to these big blocks of strokes surrounded by hiragana/katakana.