Heisig's Remember the Kana is a quick way to really work on the writing/recognition - especially if you pair it with some 'reading' to practice recognition in the real world.

Remember the Kanji is also useful for making it easier to differentiate kanji later on (and be able to write them if you practice actually writing), however, it won't help with learning the pronunciations.  I've found, for my vocabulary, that learning the pronunciations is trivial once I could easily recognize the individual variations in the kanji.

For just remembering, pairing creative mnemonics with some kind of SRS (spaced repetition system) tends to be golden.  I like to use sentences (with gap fills for the words / grammars that I'm reviewing) as well so that I'm constantly seeing vocabulary in some kind of context whenever I review it.

tools: iknow.jp is pretty slick (yay for sentences you don't have to think of yourself) and relatively cheap if you're just trying to build vocab (but I'd do RTK or something similar first) with some already built in sentences, skritter is awesome (although I think that it can be a bit expensive) because you practice the writing and the reading at the same time...

I can send you the PDF data of Japanese textbooks for beginners written in English on Skype:) 

As Kirsten says iknow.jp is very slick. I found it hard for the first 100 items (due to grammar) but it becomes much easier after that. If you learn (or just quickly read) the most basic grammar conjugation rules (past tense for adj/verbs and the Te form) you won't have the problems I had.

You can mimic how iknow works with Anki, but it can be a pain to set up.

When I learned katakana, I learned how to write the names of everyone around me. Because I'd made it personal, katakana became a lot easier to remember. My friend and I also used to pass each other notes in class that were in English, but written in katakana (not many of our classmates learned Japanese, so it was like our code), and while it was fun I'm not sure I'd recommend that lol.

As for remembering words and phrases... I'm not so good at that either, really. I'm trying to make a game out of learning them - I pick five words/phrases for a day, and I get one point every time I hear or read them, and five points if I say or write them. Since you're actively on the lookout for these words/phrases, they're a little easier to remember.