I've decided that I will wait until after RTKLite to learn the readings, but I was wondering how one would actually go about the process of acquiring vocabulary from native sources (which I assume is meant to inspire an "Aha!" discovery moment), without actually knowing what the kanji mean in Japanese.

I guess what I'm asking is whether or not this is a good idea:

1. Learn kanji without readings via RTK1 and RTK3 + basic grammar (assuming that a basic grammar book will give me the vocab necessary to follow along)
2. Go through and learn the Japanese vocab associated with each kanji I've learned from RTK by putting the vocab in a sentence, and adding that sentence to my SRS for review.

It's with this second step that answers on the forum seem to diverge.

What do you do with the kanji once you've learned to recognize them? People say "Learn vocab," but how is that actually helping me to give meaning to the kanji I've learned? Should I just accept that compounds xyz = insert_hiragana, copy the sentence into my SRS for review, and be done with it? Am I over-thinking this?

Ambiguous answers seem to present more questions than answers, so if you can, try to be specific with your responses.

EDIT: I should also point out that my goal is to get into native material as soon as possible.

I'm still a beginner, so someone with more experience should chime in after me, but this is how I've approached it so far.

I knew some words from anime and then some in hiragana from my textbook (Japanese for Everyone). I got close to finishing RTK (~1500), and then ended up stopping. I plan on finishing it after I complete my textbook.

Here's a very simple example. Let's take the word for mother (お母さん), or "okaasan." I already knew this word, but I didn't know how to write it. One day, while reading a simple short story, I saw "お母さん". I knew that "母" means "mother" from RTK. So I guessed correctly that お母さん = okaasan = mother.

This is quite easy with words that only have one kanji in them. You'll be able to guess a lot of readings because the meaning of the kanji will be similar or the same as the word. You'll have lots of "aha!" moments :-).

As for words with multiple kanji, I try to make a mnemonic/story similar to what I'd do for learning a kanji with RTK.

Sometimes you can make sense of the kanji together, like 電車 (densha) is an easy one. "Electric car" makes sense since a train is electric and it is a type of vehicle. So that should be easy to remember. Another good example is 外国人 (がいこくじん). So we have "outside, country, person" which means "foreigner." Makes sense right? Very logical.

Another example is the word for honey, specifically honey that bees make. It's "hachimitsu" or 蜂蜜. The word for bee happens to be 蜂 (hachi), and the word for nectar/honey is 蜜 (mitsu). Makes sense right? Way better than English at least :-).

Then there are words that have kanji that sort of make sense together, but aren't as obvious as the examples above. In this case, you should make a really good mnemonic to remember it if you are having trouble.

Sometimes I already know the pronunciation of the word but I don't know the kanji in it, or I try to learn them both at approximately the same time (e.g. same day) with a break in between memorizing the reading and then the kanji. I make sure I know which reading corresponds to which kanji. You'll start to notice patterns after a while. If you know 電車 (densha), suddenly you can easily learn 電話 (denwa = telephone). So, "電" often reads as "den."

Similar to RTK, where you have radicals/elements that make up the kanji, the kanji become building blocks that make up words.

So far I am not memorizing the sounds/readings of each kanji separately from words. I just learn the word, make note of each reading, and then I'll see that kanji reading again in another word and it gets reinforced.

I hope I answered your question.

My question is when I have finished the the book, how do I begin to acquire the associated readings? Many say that you're supposed to read up on grammar, and start finding the readings of each kanji "in the wild" by reading native material, but I don't see how anyone could trudge through native material without any prior vocabulary... You would be looking up every word.

The reason this seems confusing is because if I finish RTK and say screw the kanji for now and just learn the hiragana in isolation, then it seems like I would be contradicting the whole point of Remembering the Kanji...

...Unnnlessss I'm supposed to learn the readings of each kanji in the context of a sentence, due to the large number of homonyms. But then it becomes a matter of finding sentences that are readable, and that seems in itself somewhat daunting.

Am I missing something here?

Just learn the readings in the compounds, there is very little point in learning them in isolation for the most kanji.

You also talk about learning the readings of each kanji but that happens automatically when you learn the vocabulary associated with the kanji. I think it would benefit you to stop thinking of kanji and their readings as separate entities and start thinking of them as simply part of words. Vocabulary is what you want to be learning.

Canned materials are just fine. Core2k/6k deck works wonders. Native material can wait until you have 2k-3k+ vocab under your belt.

I am a beginner too. I have stopped a few times studying RtK and also studied a in a course of Japanese. Now I am on my own (Not really, since on the internet we`re not alone)

So, I reached 1200 kanji on RTK and a I am a bit tired of doing it only. So now, I took my old minna no nihong book and started to review it.

From this book I pick up sentences to review grammar but as I add them in my ANKI srs I usually write it and on the "back" card I write the Kanji and its reading.

Usually the sentences on minna no nihongo(it`s a beginners book) have only one or two kanjis being the rest in hiragana. So I expect to learn the reading of many kanjis this way.

After I finish these two books that supposedly takes you to N3, I will begin reading manga, being yotsubato the first. It`s a comic for kids and due to that the kanjis always have furigana.

So my idea is step by step increase the difficulty level of my mangas because comics for older people tend no to have furigana.

Thats how I expect to learn vocab, reading and grammar.

Ah! twice a month I meet up with a tutor, native speaker.

OK, I see what your question is.

In order to actually learn vocab, going through either some textbooks, or doing a core2k/core6k Anki deck like Betelgeuzah suggested is good.

I'm going through my textbook but I use the corePlus Anki deck and just add tags to the vocab in each chapter and then I can sort the words by chapter in the deck to study them. Since Japanese for Everyone doesn't use tons of kanji, I try to learn the kanji on the Anki cards while I learn the reading for the vocab, but I don't focus on it a ton right now since I know I'll really get going with kanji once I finish RTK and then get into my intermediate textbook (Tobira).

Edit: Also, I just learn the vocab word (in isolation). I don't bother with the CORE sentence yet since I'm still learning grammar. I do read the sentence and have the audio turned on though...but I don't quiz myself on the sentence.

You probably won't be reading much native material as a beginner, but there are some things that are on the easy side, like the Graded Reader series levels 0 and 1 (http://japanesegradedreaders.com/).

There are some free websites in this thread you can try as well for reading practice:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=4133