Here’s the thing about Japanese:  It should be easy.  It’s not really a hard language, to be honest.  It seems like one, but that’s only because I feel we approach it in exactly the wrong way.  If you try to memorize it, you’ll kinda fail, or it’ll be at least a lot harder than it needs to be.

The trick to learning Japanese is to accept it for exactly what it is, and leave all of your English preconceptions at the door.  Japanese is difficult only because we can’t let go of what we know.

Kanji is something almost but not entirely unlike anything in the English language, and this is because the meaning of each symbol, and the use and pronunciation of the symbol, are almost neatly divorced from each other.  We’re taught early on that kanji can have a multitude of different pronunciations, and that becomes very intimidating very fast.  That’s because we’re treating it like an alphabet, like hiragana or katakana or even romaji, and it isn’t one.  A kanji is a meaning upon which a word is built, and that’s all it is.

It’s not the kanji you have to memorize.  It’s the words.  Because here’s the not-so-dirty little secret of kanji:  the pronunciation of a kanji is always exactly the same when it’s in a word .  Even if it has eight different pronunciations on its own, that doesn’t matter – the pronunciation never changes when it’s a part of a word.

So you can have 生まれ (umare), which means something like “time of birth”, and 先生 (sensei), which means “teacher”.  Both contain the same kanji, which means roughly “life” or “birth”, but the kanji are used in two different ways, and have two different pronunciations.  If you just memorize the kanji, you’ll be utterly confused.  If you memorize the word, and accept that the kanji is pronounced differently each time, then you might have a bit more to learn but you will not be confused.

You can even end up with the same kanji twice pronounced differently in the same word, such as 日曜日 (nichiyoubi, or Sunday).  Just let go of the fact that they’re the same kanji.  It’s that much easier in the end.

Sometimes the kanji is itself a word.  Fine.  Then it has its own pronunciation in that case (kun-yomi), memorize it as a word, and move on.  But don’t then assume that that has anything to do with how it’s used in any other word.  Because it doesn’t.  It can, (such as 本 and 日本) but that’s more the exception than the rule.

This is the trap of learning Japanese.  Trying to understand it in terms of your language.  You can’t.  It’s different.  Accept the differences for what they are, and move on.