Thoughts on learning kanji in isolation as you did with the alphabet; with a phonics-like approach?

Well, I guess I have learned them like that. Over a year ago I burned out on Anki vocabilary deck, so I started kanji deck instead. Only trying to recall the meanings, I went through 2200 kanji in 5 months. Then when the daily reviews dropped low enough, i kinda wanted to start learning vocabilary again, but on the other hand I didn't want to have more daily reviews again, so I put that 6k core deck in another kind of use. I would try to read the phrase on the card and if there's a kanji I don't know how to read, i have to read it again some day. If I can read it all, i can suspend the card. I have run through the deck one full time and I'm doing a second lap now. Some words do stick but I'm mainly focusing on the readings. It's a time sink of a learning method, but at the end you can actually read so much without learning any specific words. But I do a lot of immersion and looking up stuff too, so I can't say how much those have helped to get me this good. But I'm happy with my method. I have recently started SRS'ing the 6k core deck in the traditional way, and now it's really easy, because I know almost all the readings and meanings already. Not sure if I would recommend the method to others though, you do so much work and the results will shop up so late.

/r/LearnJapanese Thread