Well, it would also be good to understand what’s on the menu in restaurants, reading street signs, filling in forms, etc. I am not sure how far verbal fluency itself would get you in any sort of language.
Rather than dividing into spoken and written, you could also talk about receptive skills (reading and listening) and productive skills (writing and speaking) and looking at it that way would mean you’re missing half of each.
Japanese was not a written language until the Chinese introduced their characters some 1,500 years ago. From that derived two syllabaries, so today you will have to read kanji, hiragana, and katakana in the same sentence usually.
The “reading” actually refers to the “pronunciation” in this case. There are two types of kanji readings in Japanese: Onyomi and kunyomi. So, take 山 for example, which means mountain in both Chinese and Japanese. The Onyomi reading is “san” whereas the kunyomi reading is “yama” (think of Fuji-san vs. Fuji-yama… that mountain in Japan).
On refers to the original Chinese sound that the character had and kun refers to the original meaning the character had and the Japanese sound equivalent. However, there can be multiple on and kun readings per character and words do not only consist of one character all the time.
This also works the other way around. The number 3 (三) can also be pronounced “san” and equally adding “-san” to a person’s name is done by adding “-さん” to it. So learning how to write a sound afterwards doesn’t really make things easier, because you can’t just pick the one you feel like when talking about mountains, numbers, or Mr/Mrs. XYZ.
I’ve written about it in this thread before…