Eleanor Harz Jorden and Hamako Ito Chaplin recommend reading the first 10 chapters of Beginning JapanesePart 1 & Part 2 as it is coordinated with Reading Japanese. There is also an Audio Cassette you can buy which comes with the book.
This was site view 12,808 of our new website at joyo96.org
"...one-fourth of all the characters used in modern Japanese occur in three-fourths of all the most frequently occurring words. This means that by concentrating on learning approximately 500 select characters, the student is assured of being able to read 75% of all the high-frequency words he will encounter in modern literature." - The Kanji Way to Japanese Language Power.