I am on hiatus from learning Japanese while I do Heisig. I intend to start learning Japanese again after finishing book one of RTK. Do you think that's a good idea? I found that kanji frustration was a huge drag on my learning, to the point of making it really boring, so I figure once I've got Heisig down cold, I'll be able to pick up kanji quickly and learn Japanese at a more natural (and more fun) pace. I'd be very interested to hear what you think about that idea since you went through the entire Heisig program.
I can vouch for Heisig as an effective way to learn Kanji. It requires a lot of patience because it takes months (some people have done it in one month, but they must be totally obsessed) and at the end of it you still can't read a thing, and, let's face it, learning 2000+ kanji is a beast of a job regardless of what technique you use. But if you can handle delayed gratification, it'll do the job. I can't say how it compares to brute force, but I don't think I would have finished 2000 kanji the brute force way. I don't think kanji are really a big problem after Heisig book 1, especially if you're reading online with Rikaichan or something like that, but you'll still see quite a few unfamiliar ones.
If you do it, check out http://kanji.koohii.com/ and read the stories that other people have posted, if you haven't already. Heisig leaves it up to you to write the last 1500 or so stories, which can be difficult. Even for the first 500 kanji, some of the stories at that website fix mistakes in Heisig or point out primitives that aren't introduced till later (there are quite a few primitives introduced in book 3 that are used without noting that they are primitives in book 1). And definitely use an SRS like Anki.
