In this video I give a basic explanation of how I started the process of going from learning Kanji with the Heisig method to learning how to read Japanese sentences. *note* This is explained with the idea that most Japanese learners have already mastered Hiragana & Katakana.
In part two of this video, I will explain how I started to learn multiple meanings for Kanji in context, and i’ll show a live example of how I go about tackling large groups of Kanji.
Jamaican Learning Japanese 
Lots of posts lately ね? It’s good to see the passion burning strong.
Here’s a little bit of knowledge I’ve come across and felt like sharing:
I used to think the same thing about “バラ” but I found out about a month ago that it is actually a Japanese word with the Kanji “薔薇”. However a massive amount of Japanese never learn the Kanji (the Japanese friends I’ve talked to say only editors and literature academics know them). As for why they write it in Katakana instead of Hiragana, I have no idea. But it’s not the only word that they do this for. On iknow.jp and some other study tools I have used, crows are always called “カラス” which made me think it was a foreign word for crow and that the bird must not have been native to Japan (maybe カラス was Spanish or German or something). (That’s also why they use the French word for bread “パン” for anyone who didn’t already know.) But when I talked to my Japanese friend about it she told me it was a Japanese word with the Kanji 烏. However, this Kanji is known by many Japanese (it’s in RTK1’s 2042) so why the kana? My guess is that 烏 looks too much like 鳥, so people started using Kana to avoid confusion and it just stuck.
So maybe the moral of this post is, Kanji is just as hard for Japanese to learn for Japanese as it is for us.