Studying kanji is among the more difficult aspects of learning Japanese and various techniques exist as a kind of “fast-track” to memorizing kanji. As Robert over a Shiawase.co.uk mentions recently, it’s unclear if any technique worms in the long-run due to the lack of objective research.
Speaking from experience when I studied for the Jplt 3 (now N4), I did the classic method of straight memorization. I bought the excellent flashcards from White Rabbit Press and reviewed them every morning over breakfast. I left them on the dining room table so I wouldn’t forget. It took a couple of months but I could recite them almost perfectly after that. Problem was that later I started to forget again of the kanji reading wasn’t something I encountered often.
Meanwhile, I was dumping a lot of vocabulary into Anki and memorizing that way daily for a year. When I learned words from Japanese TV or books I dumped them into Anki too. What I started to notice after a while was a kind of convergence: when I learned new words they often used kanji I had seen before but in a new combination. For example I encountered these words:
- 事実 – jijitsu: truth or fact
- 実家 – jikka: one’s parents’ home
- 現実 – genjitsu: reality
Although the kanji 実 wasn’t in my flashcards nor on the test, it was easy to figure out the pattern. I knew that it was read as jitsu and related to things like truth and reality.
But then it goes further. For the third word above, 現実, I encountered words like 現場 (genba, actual spot), 現在 (genzai, currently) and 表現 (hyōgen, phrase). Again it was easy to notice the pattern once you learn enough vocabulary words.
At first when you learn new words, the mental connection is real tenuous, but as you learn related words that use the same kanji the mental connection strengthens. If you learn enough words in general you can reach a kind of critical-mass where you can good educated guesses about new words. You won’t always get it right but usually you’re close. Each new related word makes it easier and easier until those kanji become almost automatic.
I suspect this is partly how native speakers learn them as they grow up. The difference is that native have 12 years of schooling to gradually learn them all, while foreigners have a lot less time.
Still, I think flashcards are a good investment as they provide a very handy reference when you’re brushing up on kanji you’re already a little familiar with. I already bought the JLPT2/N2 edition flashcards sold by White Rabbit Press. But to really make things stick you just have to practice reading and stretching your vocabulary enough that you eventually hit that critical-mass. It’s not a fast method at all, but compared to memorizing 700+ kanji for the N2 by rote memory, this method will give you a more solid foundation in the long-run.
In any case, language is not something to learn in isolation, but something you apply and practice until it becomes mundane. 
Hello, this blog is about my life as a father, Buddhist and Japanophile / Koreaphile. Any useful information I can pass along will hopefully make the 
I noticed this too. It gives a real boost of confidence when it happens.
Actually, what I find even more astonishing is that sometimes when I see a new kanji compound, I can guess pretty well how to READ it and quite often my reading would be correct (barring some cases with unique weird readings, etc.) That comes not so much from memorizing individual kanji readings, but from learning lots of new vocab and getting a ‘feel’ for how kanji fit and sound together (the individual reading might be ‘shuu’, for example, but you can tell that in this word it will be ‘jyuu’, that sort of thing). It’s nice when the language ‘clicks’ like that. 