For a start, when doing Practice on here, always turn "Show Kana" off. That's one of the main things I did and it made a big difference.
Learn some of the most common radicals and their meanings, so that you can recognise component parts of kanji, to have a much better chance of recognising kanji and of being able to figure out what their meanings are.
Just by reading the stuff at the top of the following page, then sort the table by "Important" ascending, and learn all the ones marked important—this would be a great start:
http://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/
Or use the following awesome table and sort it be "Frequency" or "Group", to have the most common radicals at the top of the list, and learn the most common ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_Japanese_kanji_radicals
After you've learned a nice chunk of the more commonly used radicals, start trying to learn the rough meaning of each kanji. Then when you find the kanji in compound words, keep an open mind when remembering the meaning of each kanji and what the combination of kanji in the word might represent.
I learnt a meaning in English to remember nearly all the 2,136 jōyō kanji by. Being able to tell different kanji apart from noticing their different component parts, and being able to say what I think the kanji means in English almost instantly—this really goes a long way with being able to get through text without needing too much furigana. Sure, you do still need to know the readings, but you can learn to recognise a massive chunk of kanji quickly this way then have an easier time associating the readings later. ^^
February 29, 2016 at 11:43am