Students tend to assume that kanji flashcards are the best way to learn kanji, but unlike Chinese characters, kanji don't have just one pronunciation, so if you really want to be able to READ, as opposed to guessing the meaning, learn the "kun" readings (the native Japanese ones) with their "okurigana" (the hiragana that make up the grammatical endings) as in ??("kaku" instead of just "ka-,sho") or ???("taberu" instead of just "ta-, shoku). (Set your browser encoding to Japanese if you can't read this. ON EDIT: Even though the kanji came out clearly as I was typing them, I can't read them now. They come out as question marks no matter which encoding I try. )

To learn the "on" readings, the ones used in compounds, add a couple of compounds to your kanji cards. It's easier to remember ? if you learn ??(shoten "bookstore") and ???(kyoukasho "textbook") at the same time, or ? if you learn ?? (washoku, "Japanese cuisine") and ?? (shokudou "dining hall") at the same time.

Remember that kanji rarely occur by themselves, so learning them in isolation will not lead to real literacy.

"Kanji and Kana" by Wolfgang Hadamitzky and Mark Spahn (published by Tuttle) gives the kanji with compounds.

This hint on learning kanji is not original with me. When I was first learning Japanese thirty years ago, a classmate who had majored in Chinese as an undergraduate told me about learning characters in context, because even in Chinese, perhaps the majority of words are made up of two or three characters.

I continued using that tactic when I myself studied Chinese, and it was a great help.