So far, I have an almost solid grasp of Hiragana, but Katakana just beats my head in trying to remember it. And they're just the same thing with different characters, so it's especially maddening in that regard. I heard Kanji has something like 1000 characters, and that Japanese kids need to know them in order to graduate middle school. That's a scary scary thought.
Something that helped me was associating the abstract forms with real objects. Ka in Katakana kinda looks like the tip of a katana, for example. And for Na, kinda reminded me of a stylized flying gnat (gNAt).
That's something I try to do, but even in Hiragana I still get tripped up by the ones that look alike, namely Ne ね, Wa わ, and Re れ. I just need some more drilling in Katakana, and it'll stick eventually.
I still need alot of practice reading things naturally, as I still need to take everything one character at a time to read what something says.
My goal is to become atleast proficient enough that I can finally do a complete playthrough of Fire Emblem 5 untranslated. That's a little ways off though.
If I remember right, there are actually tens of thousands of Kanji characters, but you only need to know a very small portion (I think it's still over 1,000, though) to be considered literate... fluent, even. I think most of them are dialect in nature. Just like in english, no one uses the whole dictionary.
I'm recalling this off the top of my head from 6 years ago, so I'm likely wrong about something here. I wish I had time to study Japanese again. I really wanted to learn.
I guess I'm not sure, but it seems like alot of memorization. Or maybe I'm just looking at them like unintelligible blocks of lines and squiggles, when in reality they can be read naturally if I know how, and I just don't know how yet. Kind of like how in English you can read words you don't know and still pronounce them even if you don't know what they mean.