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Yes, it's hard. And it takes a ridiculously long time. I memorized the full hiragana table in about 2 hours, which is a piece of cake compared to kanji. The thing is, hiragana only has one reading and one meaning, whereas kanji can have several meanings and readings.
I don't really know any official tricks to memorizing them. If you take very advanced Japanese courses, they may have some pointers on how to make it easier to learn. Memorizing the radicals first would probably help, but even that will take you a long time, and all it'll do is help you recognize patterns in more complex kanji. It won't necessarily help you understand the kanji. That's still a memorization game, but it'll probably make specific kanji easier to recognize if you can essentially see the kanji as "radical #4" + "radical #200" instead of "kanji #3793". This might sound like gibberish to you, but I don't know how else to explain it.
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