Learning Japanese

I feel like I'm treading water, trying to learn Japanese.  Because I'm finding it hard to remember the characters (hiragana--I haven't learned katakana yet) as I work through the Rosetta Stone lessons.  I try to read the sentences rather than listen to them, with mixed success.  I actually think I'll be more use to my family if I can read Japanese--I think it's difficult to speak a language as a beginner once the words are taken out of context.  In other words, when I look at a Rosetta Stone picture I may know what it means, but I'm less able to recall words "out of the blue".  But as my son reminds me, I've only been studying Japanese for a few months.  I do like the fact that Rosetta Stone shows the Japanese kana, rather than romanji (Japanese sounded out using our alphabet).  The only place they don't do that is when we're asked to spell, since we have to type.  I saw an ad for an iPad the other day, and it showed someone drawing a Japanese character--that would be great if Rosetta Stone eventually could teach the kana strokes.