Learning Kanji individually
What do I mean with learning Kanji individually? Basically you learn the kanji and it’s meaning without seeing it in words first. It’s quick to learn kanji this way but many people tend to say that it yields no benefits compared to learning the kanji directly with words instead.
But what do I think
I have been learning kanji like that since the beginning, I want to know their individual meanings as there are less kanji compared to words. This makes the amount to learn smaller in the beginning, but bigger later on as you still need the words as well. So yes, total learning amount is bigger.
However, if you are serious about learning Japanese, then I still recommend learning the kanji separately as it will help you to understand large amounts of text much easier. You may see many words using kanji and because you know their individual meaning, you could kind of guess the meaning of words even though you have no idea how the word is pronounced or its actual meaning.
Also studying the kanji individually can be a fun change compared to only focussing on word and sentence mining. I find it important to have some change in my learning every now and then to keep my motivation higher.
My day mostly starts learning kanji, then studying other things like grammar and vocab, at the end of my study session I would finish it off with a little bit more kanji learning to have a little bit more fun so I feel more positive about my study session.