I usually make flashcards with the kun/om on the back and then separate cards for vocabulary with compounds.
Do you have any strategies to learn both how to write the characters and learning the readings?
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Anonymous2009-02-20 22:48
Flashcards are useless. Why? Let me put it this way: Train as you fight. How do you train as you fight when it comes to a language? You either speak, listen, or write. Seeing as you cannot speak or listen to visual kanji, you will need to write them.
Flashcards can be great for crunching kanji, but in the end, it will be totally useless as you will forget readings if you never write.
A bad method of learning kanji is to try and force your mind to remember readings. Do you think the Japanese do this? No, they do not.
Take for example 人. Not including irregular readings, its 訓読み is hito, and its 音読み is nin and jin. If a Japanese person was to be asked for all the readings of 人, they would think hito from 人々, jin from 人類, and nin from 人間.
Obviously I dumbed down the example extremely by using the kanji 人, as finding a Japanese person over the age of 8 that can't tell you those 3 readings immediately after having been asked, is completely impossible, if you don't include mentally retarded, deaf, mute, deaf mute and blind people.
TL;DR: Stop using flashcards, and write. Learn compounds.