[anrakushi]

To be honest, i found the teaching of kanji at the university i studied at in Japan to be not very productive. although all the material we were learning with was written with kanji we had furigana on top of that to make it easy to read.

i know about 600 kanji so far and about 2500 compounds to go with those kanji.. I have learnt these since october last year. i'm still learn 5 each day with new compounds. I'm completely self taught on the kanji front.

because of my love of learning kanji i find it pretty difficult to read japanese without it, as MMM mentioned, reading something written entirely in kana is a pain.

mind you before i started really learning kanji i already knew probably 100 or so of them visually but not able to remember how to write them so i wasn't completely new to kanji when i started getting stuck into them.

I have said many times on this forum how i learnt kanji and it is surprisingly not so different to how japanese learn themselves, repetition, repetition, repetition.

Tips:
learn the radicals - they are what make up the kanji eg 月 is a radical in 服 (you can see it on the left there) knowing these radicals makes it easier to remember how to write the character and they are mostly a guide to pronunciation (beyond being pictorial representations, this was their use in creating the characters in Chinese and thus has a flow on effect to Japanese).
work from either the same order as taught in Japan or go with the order in the Japanese Language Proficiency Tests, i went with the latter.
learn your kanji with compounds, verbs etc, this will help you to remember the different pronunciation. you can do this by working of known vocabulary. lets say your vocabulary is 600 words strong at the moment and you are learning the character 日 (day,sun,counter for days) in your vocabulary you should have learnt the word for tomorrow 明日, (あした) the word for today 今日 (きょう) etc, and now you are learning uses for that character.

kanji are great and once you get past the beginners barrier to them they really become more enjoyable to learn and how the words are made up with them.