My teachers/tutors always taught me to fo the kanji separately, but when i started studying Chinese, i found tgat its actually easier to learn the characters along with the word, because otherwise you gave to go back and re-learn the way to write the words you already know and it can be frustrating, like you're taking a step backwards. You can learn the meaning the various kun and on readings on a kanji, but none of that actually helps you when you encounter the kanji in an actual word, especially since in Japanese there can be many readings to a single kanji, and It's not always apparent why a particular character is used in a particular word even if you know the meaning and reading. So if you're looking for fast fluency, skip studying the characters separately, other than learning stroke orders.

Children in Japan are also tired of learning Kanji in school, like you. They shout ”too diffficult", "tiring", "no fun", "why many ways to read?". So I recommend that you look for the KANJI textbook for those Japanese children and find a suitable one for you. The books for children are carefully and elaborately edited so that they don't throw it away. Here I introduce one of those books, a recent national three-million seller, "うんこ漢字ドリル(learning kanji through shit)". All the sentence In the book are related with UNKO (because children love it) Sorry, this is not for ladies, but it is fun and unforgettable, i.e, effective. e.g, http://image.itmedia.co.jp/l/im/business/articles/1705/31/l_yd_wed3.jpg http://image.itmedia.co.jp/l/im/business/articles/1705/31/l_yd_wed5.jpg Execpt for using UNKO, the sentence on the pages are written in very good Japanese. you can find and buy it in amazon.COM search there with うんこ漢字ドリル (unfortunately not in amazon.es, nor in amazon.de)

I usually try to remember the meaning, most useful readings, and most useful jukugo. It's not as much as it seems (at least for me anyway), and after a while, you really get into a "groove" with kanji. They become much easier to learn and recall. I've studied about 750 kanji so far using Anki and recall most of them fairly easily. Of course, sometimes a kanji isn't used in any immediately useful words, and in that case, I normally just shoot for the meaning. I too tried to learn kanji just through vocabulary, but I found it to be unfeasible in the long run. Learning kanji has enabled me to learn, remember, and recognize new vocabulary much more quickly and efficiently. Imagine if you had to learn a new letter from scratch every time you came across a new word in English (or German). You'll still be running into new characters all the time in reading, of course, but having a lot of kanji under your belt already can help make sense of the character and even guess the pronunciation before you even open up a dictionary. That makes the word easier to recall in the long run, because you're already familiar with some of its parts or, at the very least, how those parts work. So, I recommend continuing to study kanji and vocab separately. Eventually, they'll begin to intersect fairly frequently.