[Jawful]

I like the Heisig approach. It gives you a system to easily remember and recall a couple thousand kanji with minimal effort. You remove the repetative drilling approach that most kanji learners do over the course of many years and condence it into a system based around using your imagination. It works remarkably well.

That said, it doesn't do you any good to learn Japanese. You just learn the kanji that Japanese people use most frequently. Then as you actually study Japanese, you can apply the kanji (which are now easily distinguishable and rememberable in your own head) to new words that you learn.

But the nice thing is, you can look at a pair of kanji, have no idea what the word is, but have a guess as to what it might mean, based on the characters making it up. That's a good skill to have. Once you start learning readings, you can read words you don't know as well. I look at words all the time and think "you read it like this... but I wonder what the actual meaning is". It's kinda cool to have some guessing ability instead of just walking around blind all the time.