Learning Kanji

I can also recommend this to anyone with a DS who was thinking of buying a fancy expensive 電子辞書 (electronic dictionary) like a Wordtank. It's the DS Kanji dictionary cart 漢字そのままらくびきじてん!

I bought mine early this year for about 30Euro second hand a few days after my girlfriend bought her "real" dictionary (Canon Wordtank V300) for about 10 times the price. I think it's just as good for what most foreign learners need. It has some of the same dictionary data files used on larger electronic dictionaries, lots of English definitions (green text), Japanese definitions (red text) come with pronunciation kana showing the syllales attached to each character in a multi-character word, you can save interesting or useful entries to a bookmark list, there are some kanji games and it has really good handwriting recognition for stylus input of characters. Plus you should never need to turn it off! My DS can be closed and left in standby mode when I'm not using this and will get about a weeks worth of reasonably frequent use before needing charging, plus as soon as you reopen your DS it's ready to go.

Now the caveats! There's no English instruction mode so all the menus, games and screen buttons will be laden with kanji, but it's very easy to figure out how to use it. It doesn't have ALL the dictonaries that larger dictionaries like the V300 have (like historic Japanese, Slang, Eng-Eng), but I've never found this to be much of a problem. Even the largest font size is a bit small on the DS's screen so reading it and seeing how the strokes are arranged might not be easy for some.

Two common methods are to start with the JLPT sets (modeled after the order Japanese kids learn kanji in school, that is most common kanji first) or the order in James Heisig's 'Remembering the Kanji' (ordered by kanji complexity and building on previously learned kanji).

If you're planning on studying Japanese long-term, I'd recommend the RtK method (although you could study both methods in parallel if you wanted to, for example if you wanted to take some JLPT exams before you reached the relevant kanji in RtK).

Personally, I struggled through the JLPT order till about level 3 before starting the RtK method (which I think is far superior).

Here's a link to a sample of RtK, showing the order first 250 or so kanji plus an explanation of the method.

Learning kanji's going to take a while, so the earlier you start, the better.