Have you tried using Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji"? I have never tried to learn Japanese, but I have heard very good things about using this book to learn the Kanji.
My method for learning kanji was to count the strokes (it's relatively simple to figure the stroke count for any character: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/japanese/strokeorder.htm) then use that number to look them up in a dictionary.
But everything I looked up was in the context of a sentence, while trying to read a report at work, e.g.