Belton wrote: The one character you'd want to learn would be 忘 for when you tell your friends about how your kanji studies are going.
After completing Heisig you might be able to read 独善的
I fear this thread is going to become a reprise of every other thread on this subject, but]: it's horses for courses. Use whatever technique works for you. The traditional ways are:
The method used in Japanese schools: kanji are grouped into several tiers, mostly according to how commonly they are used. Every school year, students are taught a new tier, and they learn them by writing them over and over, and associating them with words that they've already learnt. They have an advantage, though, in that they've got plenty of time and know plenty of words already.
The method used by a lot of Japanese learners: kanji are learnt as they come up in textbooks, or in the same order that Japanese students learn them. Students either write them over and over, or they try to recognise them by sight. A lot of the time, students will also try to learn all of the associated readings, either in isolation, or in context, by learning words associated with each kanji (for example, the kanji 急 can be read 'kyuu', or 'iso', depending on which word it appears. Some people just learn those two readings; other people try to learn words that contain those readings).
The method that Javizy recommended, used by some other Japanese learners: This guy called Heisig arranged all of the kanji into a logical order that makes learning them easier, and devised a visual mnemonic system for learning them. Lots of kanji are re-used in other kanji. If you learn the kanji that are re-used first, then it makes it easier to learn the kanji that re-use them. Especially when you use Heisig's mnemonic system. For example, when I first wanted to remember the kanji 急, I thought of a witch, who is in such a 'hurry' (the meaning of the kanji) that she 'binds together' (the top part) lots of 'broomsticks' (the middle part), but her new device is so fast it nearly gives her a 'heart'-attack (the bottom part). (I don't really need to think of her any more - like scaffolding, these images fall away when you don't need them any more.)
The biggest drawback is that because you learn the kanji according to how they are written, you don't learn some of the most commonly used kanji until the very end - so you'll end up learning potentially obscure kanji before you'll ever need to use them, and won't really feel the full benefit until you've learn all of the 2000-odd kanji in his book. (One of my Japanese friends saw me learning the kanji for a particular type of flower and asked me why on earth I was learning it - it's only ever used at funerals.)
Other potential drawbacks are that Heisig recommends you associate each kanji with an English keyword, instead of their sounds in Japanese; and he recommends that you learn them as an entirely separate process, in advance of trying to learn Japanese. Then, when you learn Japanese, you simply learn each word as several kanji, and thus you learn their readings as a byproduct (ie. by knowing that the kanji 急 appears in the words 急行 and 急ぎます, for example). Those aren't necessarily drawbacks though, depending on how you learn.
In any case, my own use of Heisig has transformed my ability to learn Japanese. For ages I was limited to textbooks. Now that I've gone through Heisig, anything in Japanese is fair game. I mentioned in another thread that I've been playing Final Fantasy. At one point, a word that contained the kanji 避 came up and I was able to look it up online using the Mime pad to draw it using my mouse. Before doing Heisig, I'd have had no way of doing that.
You should try all of these techniques to see how they work for you. If you want to try Heisig, the first part of his book is available as a sample online.
