大変な問題だな、ありゃ。片仮名は少し難しいけど、もっと練習すれば簡単に成る。これは日本語が出来ない人に無駄だそうだけど、俺はもう日本語を使いたいよ。さぁ、今から英語を使った方はいいと思うな・・・
Some teachers teach Katakana before Hiragana because they figure that it'll be more practical - All foreign words are supposed to be written in it, and about 80% of import words these days come from English.
As for memorization ideas, I taught myself how to read kana very quickly by taking the old Ranma 1/2 RPG for Super Famicom (on an emulator) and basically transcribing the script as I played through it, and then romanized it as best as I could from there. The first few characters you'll be continually looking back at the chart, but as you see them come up repeatedly you'll start remembering them. Kanji might be a bit more difficult through that method, but you don't have to do them right away. If you work from a volume of manga, chances are there's furigana to help you with the readings, though.
As for learning Kanji, once again it boils down to reading practice. The more you read, the more you learn. Also, taking the time to sit down and learn to use a proper kanji dictionary will work wonders for your ability.
Kanji are to Japanese what Latin roots are to French. They convey concepts that are used to form words, and are consistent in appearence and pronunciation. They are also broken down into a set of standard elements, known as radicals, from which the characters are constructed. If you learn the radicals, writing them becomes much easier due to the fact that you're not memorizing how to write the character, but merely which elements are in the character and their places.
A bit of a long read, but I hope it helps people out!
Also, a really neat tool for helping people learn vocabulary can be found here:
http://language.tiu.ac.jp/tools.htmlBasically, you paste a passage of Japanese into the first box, then you click the second button. A new window will open up with the passage in a box on the left, and explanations of/definitionos for all of the words on the right. Clicking on a word takes you straight to its definition. It also reduces verbs to their original conjugation, and gives the readings for kanji! So now those of us who want to use kanji can do so without worrying about people being able to read it, and those who can't read kanji can get a hand in reading what the rest of us are saying! 最高だぜ！
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