japanese take all their school years to learn the kanji needed to function properly! you won't take less than a year to learn an actually useful bunch of them. still, start by the easiest, and build up from there, just like a preschooler. http://www.kanjisite.com/html/start/jlpt/index.html that page is good for testing your skills or improving a little. personally i don't bother with learning all the pronunciations and uses. it's better if you learn them by context, for instance, by reading actual japanese sentences. i advice you to get firefox and the addon called 'perapera-kun' it's great and helps you translate just by pointing over some text