I heard the best way to learn Kanji is to learn words with Kanji, and not the individual Kanji and their readings. Since most Japanese can't even write a lot of Kanji themselves.
I think think that's true. That's how Wani Kani teaches it anyway. Basically the break down is:
You learn the radicals that make up the Kanji
You learn the Chinese Reading (On'yomi)
the Japanese Reading (Kun'yomi)
And then vocabulary words using it.
For example: 年
I'll skip the radicals 'cause how you remember those is kind up to you.
On'yomi: Nen
Kun'yomi: Toshi
Example: 一年生 (Ichi Nen Sei) - First Year Student.
You have to learn a certain amount of individual Kanji first. For example I know 一、年、生 all independent of one another. However the magic (and probably my favorite part of the process) is once you've learned enough that they start to come together and you don't even need the dictionaries to know what you're reading.
I know what 今 means. So I know anytime I see: 今年、今週、今日、今月, that it is in reference to "Current" and then whatever the second Kanji is. I know that if I see anything proceeding 色 its probably going to be a color of some sort.
I think a lot of quitters get lost in the sauce. There's this tendency I think westerners have, especially if they're American to see "Man according to the Govt. It takes around 2000 hours of work to get fluent in Japanese. That is 40 hours a week for an entire year. I don't have that much time. AND they say its one of the hardest languages for English speakers to grasp. I can't do this." and then they either give up, or go for awhile and get frustrated and burnt out.
What I think has been the most important thing for me is and has been figuring out the rules and patterns to the language. Every language on the planet has certain rules and patterns it necessarily must follow to function. I think if you set yourself up to start to recognize the patterns, it makes stuff a lot easier.
For instance its very handy to know that all the verbs in Japanese end in う, and that in the majority of verbs they all follow the same conjugation rules. I did not until a few weeks ago understand how conjugation worked. However I could read something like 聞きません and recognize the kanji. I knew it had something to do with hearing. I knew that きません was doing
something to 聞く. So when the day came that I learned about Conjugated Forms, it very seamlessly translated over from what I already know and something I already recognized into an easy to digest fact that adds to the patterns.