In my opinion, in the first place, you'd better learn the basic radicals that are put just a few little strokes next to kanji. For example, when you see "the water" radical, the kanji will tell you "this kanji probably has something to do with water". I don't know how many foreign people know the radicals, but it absolutely helps you to figure out the meaning of kanji. You should not try to learn kanji stroke-by-stroke. Kanji is put together radical-by-radical. It is like building blocks. It can be a pretty quick process and I recommend you this way. If you don't know ABCs of English, how do you know the spelling of "apple", like" A-P-P-L-E"? The link below might help you: http://www.tofugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/kanji-radicals-cheatsheet.pdf http://www.renshuu.org/ I couldn't find a very helpful website (maybe non-native Japanese speakers know some?), but you can try to search other websites and good luck on your studies!

Kanji alive: A free study tool for reading and writing kanji kanjialive.com/‎ Kanji alive, is a free web application designed to help Japanese language students of all levels learn to read and write kanji.