Kanji studying misgivings

I continue to have misgivings about my kanji studying methodology. I've bounced around between several different methodologies, and even gave up on studying kanji for a while as I focused again on grammar constructs. I'm still convinced though that my ability to learn the language will greatly increase if I am able to read books, and for that I need to "know" kanji.

First a little background on kanji. Each kanji can have a variety of meanings, but those meanings all relate to each other. I'm going to use "ishi" (石) as my example, since it pretty much means "stone". Now, in Japanese kanji can have several different "readings". While the kanji itself means stone, depending on what word that kanji shows up in, it might sound like seki,shaku, koku, or ishi. The kanji finds itself in such words as oil, stone, pebble, coal, jewel. You can see how those words are all related to stones. My dilemma is that just knowing the meaning of a kanji doesn't necessarily help. When I'm trying to read a word that is composed of two or three kanji, even if I know the meaning of the individual kanji, that doesn't give me how to read the word, or what word the three kanji together form. As I mentioned above, if I see 石, it could be read in one of several different ways. Do I study the kanji, the meaning, and memorize all of the readings? Will those readings help me by themselves? I've used a methodology whereby instead of studying just the readings, I've actually memorized words that the kanji shows up in. In that way it's more like memorizing vocabulary than individual kanji. I automatically know how to read the word since I memorized that group of kanji's reading.

While that is a great way to eventually learn how to read, it also seems very inefficient. I could learn a word for every one of 石's readings (in this case four words). This means that I would put my effort into learning how to write 石, the meaning of 石, four words which contain the different readings of 石, those word's meanings, and how to read those words. Instead of doing all of that, I could just learn how to write 石, the meaning of 石, and the four readings related to it. Is the latter approach the better way of learning kanji? Is it too artificial to be useful for reading? In the latter case, I might know all of the readings for a kanji when I come across it in a word, but I won't necessarily know which reading is correct, or the meaning of the word. I think I will try to switch to the latter method in the hopes that being familiar with a lot more kanji will let me more easily match up words in kanji whose readings I don't know with vocabulary that I memorized without learning the kanji.

Vocabulary Studying Method

Learning a language is a daunting task. I realized at the onset that I would have to quickly find an efficient way of studying, or be doomed. Trying to memorize a whole chapter's worth of words just wasn't working for me. I would write the words down on flashcards and just attempt to memorize them all at once, but I realized that while some words came very quickly, most did not. On top of that, there were a few that I just couldn't remember.

Okay, I'd like to take an opportunity to rant a little here. Whats the deal with books that put lots of similar words together in the same chapter... for instance, to open, to close, to turn on, to turn off. Putting a bunch of similar seeming words and their opposites together into one group of words to study messes with my brain. Am I the only one for whom this seems to make things extra difficult?

Anyways, back to the studying methodology. It dawned on me that I could memorize small batches of words and build up from there. Now the way I study is to take a stack of notecards, and take the first six. I memorize those, put them aside in a pile (I'll call it the "memorized pile"), and take the next six. I then memorize those, and go back to the memorized pile to review them and make sure I have forgotten any. If I have forgotten some, I put them aside in a "forgotten pile", and then put all the memorized cards up to this point into the memorized pile. I then take six more, and memorize them. I then go back through the memorized pile and make sure I haven't forgotten any, and if I have then I put them in the forgotten pile. I keep doing this until all I am left with are the two stacks, memorized and forgotten. I then repeat the process with just the forgotten cards. Once I complete this if there are any really difficult stragglers left over, I focus on studying them for a couple minutes, then mix the cards up again and repeat until I don't have any more problems.