Remembering the Kanji

Over the last few months I have been studying Kanji using the book "Remembering the Kanji". It's a great book. The traditional way people learn Kanji is as kids in school, when they are introduced to the Kanji, it's core meaning, how to write it (stroke order etc.), then it's Japanese pronunciation (there might be several) and it's Chinese pronunciation. For example, 月. It means moon, or month. There are four strokes that have to be learnt in a particular order. The Chinese pronunciation is "tsuki". The Japanese is "getsu" or "gatsu", depending on the other kanji around it. Now this is a pretty simple example, and is one of the first kanji Japanese kids learn in school. But still, there are quite a few things to remember. Now, consider that there are over 2,000 kanji that the Japanese government have deemed to be standard everyday use kanji, and you can see just how herculean a task it is to learn all of them. Next, think about all the time Japanese kids must spent drilling and memorising kanji instead of learning about other stuff, like the world and everything in it. But they love their kanji, that's for sure.
So a poor foreigner comes along with a life, and job, friends, hobbies, and a brain already configured for another language, and they start studying kanji like the Japanese kids do. One by one, meaning, stroke order, numerous pronunciations, then drill, drill, drill. Impossible. So what this book does is teach you the meaning and the stroke order first, and then move on to the pronunciation (that's in volume 2. I haven't done that one yet). The author, James Heisig, argues that adult foreigners don't have the time or the developing brain to be able to learn kanji like the Japanese do. So he uses "imaginative memory" to learn the meaning and stroke order, and later, the pronunciation. He argues that Japanese people use it too, only in Japan it would be considered cheating. Here's an example.
厚. It means "thick". There are three "elements" in this kanji. The upside-down "L", which we have learnt means "cliff" because it looks like a cliff. 日, which is by itself a kanji and means "sun" or "day", and 子, which again is itself a kanji, and means "child". So you have to come up with a story, an image, that you can remember that incorporates these elements and the meaning of the kanji. For this one, I use "In Sparta, they threw unwanted babies off a cliff to die under the hot sun. Only the thick-skinned babies survived." You can see the story in the Kanji. Just to be clear of the positions, I put in "children under the hot sun". There you go. Some are easy, some are really hard to conceptualize. There is an awesome website where you can manage all the kanji you are studying, and is really the reason I got into studying kanji again. The stories people come up with are hilarious.
The argument is that when someone already knows the meaning of the kanji, it is easier to remember the pronunciation. That may be true, but in any case, it is easier than trying to remember everything at once. Sometimes it's great, sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my time because I'm not learning how to actually read them, but then again the alternative of just slogging through them trying to learn everything at once would drive me nuts. If you are interested in Chinese or Japanese characters, get this book. You don't need to be able to speak Japanese or anything, and you won't learn how to with this book, but you will know what all those tattoos mean.