Learning Japanese Kanji
Some people are put off from learning Japanese because the writing systems seem so complicated. Fortunately, it's actually much more fun and doable to learn how to read and write Japanese than it looks at first glance.
There are two phonetic alphabets, hiragana and katakana. They each have 46 characters, but they're not too hard to learn. My husband and I learned them using this video: Learn Hiragana and Katakana in PAIRS. You can find more mnemonics for remembering these alphabets online, but once you start reading little sentences and words, you'll gain the practice you need to begin reading these alphabets easily. (For all the criticism some people throw its way, I think Duolingo provides a lot of great reading practice in its regular activities.)
But those aren't the writing systems that tend to really intimidate people. Most people are intimidated by kanji.
How am I going to memorize tens of thousands of symbols? Forget it.
But you don't have to memorize tens of thousands of symbols. You will understand most things knowing 1,000 and nearly everything knowing about 2,000.
How am I going to memorize 1,000 to 2,000 symbols? Enter Heisig. He came up with an excellent mnemonic system for remembering kanji: Heisig's Remembering the Kanji.
You can learn the kanji directly from Heisig's book, or you can buy the book, but then learn the kanji his way through an Anki deck. There are many Anki decks for Remembering the Kanji. I like the one called Recognition RTK 630. (When you install the Anki app, you can search for decks.) This one includes Heisig's mnemonics, plus highly rated mnemonics found online, so you can pick whatever ones you find most memorable.
The mnemonics break the kanji down into smaller parts called radicals and have little stories or thoughts that relate these to each other. If you use some of the user-created mnemonics in a Heisig deck, you'll have memorable bits about Mr. T and Data from Star Trek Next Generation.
In addition to being easier to learn than one might think, kanji are really delightful.
Here is the word for aquarium: 水族館
水: water
族: tribe/clan/race
館: hall/mansion/building
So, the aquarium is the water tribe hall. Delightful!
Here is the kanji for electric: 電 It kind of looks like an eel, an electric eel.
And here is the kanji for car or vehicle: 車 It kind of looks like a car as seen from above.
電車 = electric car/vehicle = train. Neat!
Or how about the kanji for witch? 魔 It looks like an oni (sort of like a demon) in a cave of trees. Very memorable if you've seen Throne of Blood (1957)!
All this to say, kanji are not as hard as they seem, and, rather than being a bunch of boring symbols to memorize by brute force, they are great fun.