are there any sites that you guys recommend to start learning the kana japanese characters?I plan on learning the kana first and then moving to the kanji.

look for a torrent or buy from amazon.com all 3 of james heisigs(remembering the hiragana, katakana, and kanji books. I learned hiragana on a single one-night study binge with his book. Ive found with all the foreign scripts ive learned that the best books teach you not in alphabetical order, but in groups of similar letters with some mnemonics thrown in. The penguin russian book does this, "The Arabic Alphabet: How to read and write it" does it, and james heisig made a system for learning the japanese scripts so thorough and memorable that he beat the japanese at their own teaching game.

Be warned though, the 2 kana books teach you pronunciation, different script styles for recognition, a brief etymology, and the mnemonic devices he came up with, BUT the kanji book is different. His book is all mnemonics and doesn't teach you any pronunciation, just the meaning. You will learn the kanjii by the radicals/primitive elements(for example most of the first 50 I learned were all box shapes: mouth, eye, plenty, day, sun, moon, rice field, companion, prosperous, spine, risk,span, nightbreak, olden times, white, oneself, stomach, hundred, in etc.) with no guide to pronunciation. That's because he's training your visual and imaginative memory here. You will pick up the japanese words for the symbols separately as you study the language itself. We were discussing characters in this other thread: http://www.totse.com/community/showthread.php?t=2143552 They really aren't fit for any language. They offer no pronunciation clues or anything, it's a bunch of strokes with abstract meanings attached to them. You can learn the meanings without learning the language.