I took 2 years of Japanese when I was in high school. I don't think I could of had less efficient way of learning characters. We learned only Hiragana at the beginning of the the first semester of the first year, and we didn't touch Katakana until the beginning of the second semester. By the end of the first year I don't think we learned any more than 20 kanji, and they were really basic ones (numbers and a few others like 人 and 日). We actually didn't detach from romanji until the second year, romanji was still slapped under katakana words for the whole second semester. (cake written as "KEEKI" etc. Imagine what kind of habits that might have gave to a student). At the end of the second year (let me remind you that's two years) we probably had a little under a hundred down. I forgive the class in thinking maybe it was more focused on speaking rather than reading and writing, but even then even the good students weren't able to construct simple sentences from the top of their head (except for this one Korean guy that lived in Japan for two years and this one other guy that had a Japanese mother).
This was back when I didn't really care about learning Japanese, so I didn't leave feeling too disappointed, but since I began studying on my own I realize how inefficient it was. I'm glad I learned about RTK and the huge amount of language communities and resources online.
