The additional learning challenge of kanji is one aspect of Japanese that makes it a slow language to learn. There are roughly 3000 kanji in common usage, including rare or specific ones for names of people and places. Another challenge with kanji is that there are usually at least two ways to read them depending on the context: the Chinese-derived reading called “On’yomi” and the native Japanese reading called “Kun’yomi”. However, just like with vocabulary, kanji follows the Zipf’s Law trend. In fact, the 1000 most common kanji account for 90-95% of written text. I won’t get into the details of how and when to read kanji one way or another because that content is everywhere online. Instead, here I will just talk about how you can go about managing to learn the kanji with their meaning and readings.
You may have guessed that my main strategy for learning kanji is the same as for vocabulary (Anki, that is), but there are a couple important steps you should take before jumping into memorizing kanji headfirst. Kanji can seem difficult to remember at first because it is so foreign; but as with any memorization-based task, the more familiar the content and the more context you have for it, the easier it will be to retain. Becoming familiar with some of the characteristics of kanji beforehand can aid retention dramatically.
First, learning kanji stroke order will make them easier to remember. Each kanji has a special order to their strokes, much the same as how many letters of English are written a certain way. The standard methods for kanji writing practice are everywhere, and a brief search for “kanji stroke order” will return plenty of free resources explaining how you must write. Using the 50 or so most common characters, you can learn stroke order and practicing writing them by hand. You don’t have to memorize them at this point necessarily, but once you grasp the standard left-to-right, top-to-bottom stroke order for characters, you will generally be able to learn a new one and predict the stroke order accurately.
Second, every kanji is made up of recognizable subcomponents called “radicals”. Many of these radicals are kanji in their own right, and you will learn them whether or not you dedicate any focus to them. The 214 radicals make up all of the 3000 or so common kanji, so spending some time to go over them at least once can make them more recognizable later on. Memorizing these is purely optional and I would only recommend that you familiarize yourself with them enough so that you can recognize later how a kanji is built from these pieces.
Third, start your kanji journey after learning a couple hundred words of vocabulary. Put that at around 3 or 4 weeks after starting your vocab with Anki. Having a foothold in common vocabulary will help you to get a foothold with some of the most common kanji.
Using all three of these tips before diving into kanji will decrease the mental load for memorization. I am only here to introduce the techniques that will take you far, not the actual content of Japanese, so you will want to read or watch other introductions to kanji online as well. There is a other relevant context for the history of kanji and how they work. Remember to go slow and not to overburden yourself. Introducing even 3 kanji per day with Anki is not too few, especially at first. You don’t have to become a kanji expert to start reading — a couple hundred is enough — and once you are practicing some reading, you will be seriously locking in kanji when you see them repeated in text.