Kanji in Context

I've been in Japan for just over three years now. When I first got here, I found a book called "Kanji in Context" either in my apartment or at my desk at school, and I've been using it ever since to learn kanji.

Yesterday, when I was reading the (almost) daily announcements sheet (instead of saving paper and sending the announcements to us by email, we get a paper copy in our "mailboxes" -- it's unreal how much paper is wasted around here), I came across a pair of kanji that I had yet to see written together. I knew at least one "reading" of the individual characters, but I wasn't sure how to read the two together, so I asked a junior-high-school student for help.

He had no clue, so he asked a classmate, but that guy also had no clue, so he asked a third guy. The third guy finally told me how to read the two kanji together, but what he said was not what I thought the reading was. Oddly enough, it turns out he was wrong and I was right.

So many kanji look alike, and it turns out that the student mistook the kanji I showed him for a similar-looking one. The proper reading of the pair I showed him was "sai gei," but the student told me it was "sai katsu." The former means something like "second posting," whereas the latter probably doesn't exist (if it did, it would mean something like "second thirst").

Anyway, you can see how similar the two kanji on the right of each pair are and therefore how difficult they are to learn.

How the heck am I, a foreigner, supposed to learn to read this stuff when the Japanese themselves can't even read them? It's certainly a challenge, but I guess you could say I'm making progress!