Probably the most popular single book for learning kanji is Remembering the Kanji (aka RTK) by James Heisig. RTK systematically uses two tricks to make learning Kanji as painless as possible. First, you will learn a ‘primitive’ which is a building block that is used in many Kanji characters. Once you learn the primitive, you will learn all of the kanji characters that use that primitive. The second trick RTK uses is that each character is assigned an English “keyword” that approximates it’s meaning in Japanese and a “story” which helps you remember the keyword.

I recommend learning Kanji at the same time as learning vocabulary. I have found for myself that learning kanji and vocabulary in parallel is a little more efficient then learning each separately.

There are many RTK Anki decks to choose from but this is the one that I used. I’m studying primarily on my iPhone, so I edited the card format for a cleaner look without all of the extraneous information. Below is the code and some screenshots.

Front:

<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 28px;'>{{Kanji}}</div>

and here is the back:

{{FrontSide}} <hr id=answer>&nbsp<span style="font-size: 24px; ">{{Keyword}}<br><br></span>&nbsp<span style="font-size: 11px; ">{{Story}}</span>&nbsp<br><br>&nbsp<span style="font-size: 11px; ">{{Story 2}}</span><br>&nbsp<span style="font-size: 11px; "><a href="http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1MUQ{{Kanji}}">JDIC</a></span>&nbsp