Kanji: cool tools

tl;dr: Check out Kanji Study, for Android or iOS.

Long version:

I use the texts (Walsh, and Heisig) from the previous post to give me stories to help me remember the kanji, but I also need to practice.

One way is just to write them on paper.  I've heard that in Japan teachers say, just write it ten times.  OK; good practice.

I also do it on my tablet.  Kanji Study (also for iOS) is a great program for doing this.  You can pick the set you want to study, select Study and Writing Challenge, and start going at it with a stylus or your finger.  If you can't do it, after a couple of strokes it'll give you a hint.  I'm up to 600+ kanji now, starting four months ago I think, admittedly having learned maybe 150 previously.

The way I did it:  put all the groups together, N5 to N1 and beyond, in a group called "all"; move the ones I want to learn into "current"; look in Heiseig to get some mnemonic to help me; and when I've learned them, they go into a group called "done."  I tend to select sets with common radicals, because I find that easier.  I go back through "done" periodically for review, selecting out those I forgot for a group named "review."

One bad side to this app is that there's no easy way to search a group for the kanji I want; I must do it visually.  (I can also look it up in a web browser and bring it into Kanji Study through the clipboard.) Another bad side is that it seems like it takes five or six screen commands to actually get to the part of the program I want.

I also make my own list in Word of compounds of kanji (like 日本語, "Japanese language"), and use that file as easily made flashcards, as I do with my vocabulary from Rosetta Stone.  It's easy, using Microsoft IME to type Japanese into.

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There's only one other program I'm using for kanji:  Kanji Recognizer.  (There's an iOS equivalent, and here's a web site that does the same thing.)  Write the kanji and it should give you the character so you can cut and paste it into something else.  But I use this only when I don't know what it sounds like (because if I do, I can look it up by pronunciation).