I started with learning vocabulary and went through a 700 word list based on JLPT N5. It included both kana and kanji cards. I wasn't too interested in reading at the time (was more interested in listening), so this suited me. Then I decided I needed to read Japanese to learn and thus Kanji became necessary. I having a lot of luck with a method based on breaking the Kanji into pieces and then remembering each character as sort of a combination of its pieces. This is based on the method used in the Remembering the Kanji books, although I'm not using those books. Before I did this, the words that I "knew" the Kanji for, I basically only recognized vague shapes like lots of lines, especially horizontal lines with a box. After using this method, a Kanji becomes something like bird 鳥 + mountain 山　= island 島. This is much easier to learn than a collection of random lines. For instance, I think of it as birds rest on islands which are really just mountains partially under the sea. I've been trying to use the actual meanings for the parts, but it almost doesn't matter. What really matters is that you can recognize sub-pieces and reuse them. I'm trying to learn them in frequency order except learning parts before wholes. A lot of Kanji are used as part of another Kanji. I just started 7 days ago and I've gone through about 500 Kanji so far. I'll still need to review them a bunch of times before I really know them, but it has been much easier than I expected. I'm only trying to learn to recognize the Kanji and remember the meaning. It is probably much more difficult if you want to be able to right them as well, but I only plan to type them using hiragana input. If you want to follow this approach, check out the site koohii. The Kanji seem very closely related to the vocabulary meanings and pronunciations. I'm actually expecting learning the Kanji to speed up overall learning.