[aphextwin]

Thanks a lot guys, I read all the advice and though I still don't quite understand kanji, I feel like I'm on the verge of an "ahha" moment so I'll see where I am in a week or two.

Yuriyuri, in your example...
少ない　（すく・ない）
少し　（すこ・し）
... you said that if you came across the second of these in a newspaper or wherever, you might look it up because it's a new word and with new words, the reading of the kanji might change, right? But then, what's even the point of kanji, because if every time you see a new word with the same kanji character there's a chance the obscured non-hiragana part might have changed and you need to look it up, that seems really counterproductive and like a bad way to organize a language. Why not just use hiragana always if the very root kanji that's supposed to simplify things changes from word to word? I understand the language just is how it is, so I should get used to it, but I guess I'm not seeing the convenience of kanji.

Also, I've heard people say how after you get familiar with kanji, sometimes you'll come across a new one and kinda know already what it's about or might mean. Could someone tell me a bit about how you infer that, is it just by the "primitives" or "radicals" used?

Kyle, I'm gonna try Anki and try your pacing, but I just today started "Remembering the Kanji" so might stick with that for a while. Memorizing readings, meaning, and symbol was seriously not working. Maybe it will after I get a bit more used to the language, but for now I like Heisig's idea of just learning all the kanji, how to write them, and their meanings, and then learning the readings later on. I think breaking it up that way will help me, at least for now. That's the same thing I was doing when I played Slime Forest Adventure (memorize the kanji's appearance and a mnemonic) and it seemed to work great. It's only when I started trying to learn meaning, reading, and appearance at the same time that nothing seemed to stick. Anyone have any opinion of this method of breaking up the tasks?

One last thing: If I studied the "Core 2000" and turned off the kanji setting so that everything appears in kana, would that be a really bad idea? I am basically trying to learn as much grammar, structure, words, etc. as possible in a short period of time so I think studying it will just help me in general to speak basic japanese and understand more, but if going through the Core 2000 in kana will somehow lay down bad memories in my brain or if it's just bad in general to learn that way without also learning the kanji at the same time, I might reconsider. I'd ideally just like to learn a lot of words and sentence patterns and then later on learn match the kanji to the individual words.

Alright, thanks in advance for any help : )