I was stuck at the 'learning kanji' phase for a very long time, trying brute memorization and other methods. The thing that helped me out was stumbling on the book "Remembering the Kanji" by James Heisig.
He shows a systematic building-block type approach to learning the basic meaning of the 2200 basic use kanji. I can't recommend it enough! It literally only took me a matter of months after I found this book to do what years of study hadn't even done for me!