Is it worth learning the kanji that make up a vocab word, or is it better to just learn the kanji in context? I have been using Migaku Kanji God for about 8 months now to pull out the Kanji of new vocab words just before I review them, and I am wondering what everyone thought of this. I actually felt like it was very helpful when I first started using it, but now I am just finding it tedious and not seeing the value very much. I am thinking that it may be a better tool when you are just starting out to help you get your head around things, but now it just seems to slow things down. Especially with kanji that have so many meanings that whichever word is arbitrarily assigned as the “translation” is not necessarily how you will see it most often.
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I don’t use any of the tools you mentioned, but how I make sense of kanji compound words is by relating it to strictly other Japanese vocabulary as much as I can. I’ll occasionally use English vocabulary in my head, but not those limited keywords that something like RTK uses.
By “relating kanji compound vocabulary to other Japanese vocabulary,” I mean I’d think of something like 勧誘 as “勧めて誘うこと”, or 説教 as “説いて教えること”, or 仮面 as “仮の面”. Stuff like that.