It took a few hours to memorize kana, I personally can't stand flashcards, but rather just write them over and over in sequence.
あ、ああい、あいいう、あいううえ、あいうええお。。。
I did this with both Hiragana and Katakana and it didn't take long to learn to write and read them. For memorizing them, I just read children stories, even If I didn't understand them, I'd read and write it down as fast as I could. I would write the first character that came to mind if I seen that symbol. So in the beginning a lot of it was wrong, but I eventually got it in a few hours. Since I don't really have a partner to talk with, I do this every day for an exercise, about 5mins worth, both a quiz, and reading. This is where I used smart.fm and livemocha.com for the quiz.
Here are the stories I read from;
http://life.ou.edu/stories/
For Kanji however, I'm doing a flash card system, along with the sequence method…but I don't have anywhere near 150 kanji yet lol. For Kanji I'm having trouble basically remembering the on and kun'yomi. I can memorize the character, and the meaning, but not the sound. I gotta get to work on fixing that problem...