you know... I have a cool book of kanji. It's on english. It's cool enough.=) I all remembered because of it. Also I personaly remember all by words where this kanji is. if you want I may send you this book. It have 2 parts. one part is enough to past for 5JLPT. second to pass 4JLPT.

Use the book "Remembering the Kanji"... James Heisig. Should take you only about 2 months. It works, trust me.

When I was a elementary school student, I was taught about Kanji for the first time in my life. First, I wrote my name in Kanji. Second,number,,,,,step by step. Why don't you write a diary in Hiragana & Kanji?

A dictionary is necessary.But you also need to do a lot of writing.

Ultimately, the most economic way to do it is as Linda said: get yourself a kanji book. It's going to come down to rote memorization. It's easy to dismiss this as a pain, but if your able to discipline yourself to do it (little by little), you'll find language acquisition (actually, any memory based activity) in general to be easier as your memory will develop and grow. Knowing the multiple readings of each kanji will make learning words far easier as you'll easily be able to string both the meanings and the sounds together.