It’s like having to travel a really long road, and at the start, right next to you, is a bunch of separate parts to a bicycle. Sure, you can just start walking and feel like you’re making progress sooner (instant-gratification), or you can sit down for an hour, build the bicycle, and reap the benefits later when you realize you’ll still reach your destination sooner, even with a late start.

Only people who haven’t finished RTK have issues with it.

(Note: I don’t know how effective using the actual book would be. I used Anki [if you don't know the power of SRSs than you're behind the times], so making and flipping through 2,042 flashcards wasn’t an issue.)

I think you’ll find as many different views on RTK as there are people. It doesn’t help everyone, and different people are helped to different extent. I gained around 1000 kanji using it, but many learn all 2000, while others give up very quickly.

One point I would like to add is that learning Japanese is a vast area because of the ridiculous complexity of the written language. RTK helps by solving part of the problem. It’s not a way to learn everything about every kanji, but it doesn’t claim to be that. It’s a way to get yourself immersed in that aspect of the language and gives you a huge advantage over learning them how they expected us to do it at school, by rote as we encounter them, which is basically impossible unless you have a photographic memory.

One of the advantages of RTK1 is that it teaches writing in a structured format. You start simple and then combine them into bigger kanji. The reviewing goes from the keyword to the kanji, so you get a lot of practice producing kanji, and as a result you won’t have to practice to be able to recognize the characters when they come, even for some of the stylized forms or slightly messy handwriting.

It also gives the ability to look up words you don’t know. I recognize the characters in 世界 and can use the keywords to get the characters to put into WWWJDIC.

Using the traditional way, for a new word you have to learn
1. Pronounciation
2. Meaning
3. Crazy jumble of strokes

Learning all three at once is usually prone to trouble, and context still doesn’t give active recall practice.

After doing RTK, you only have to learn 2 things at once, and you also have a device to remember which characters are used to write stuff. せかい　=　generation + world = 世界　(Elaborate stories using the keywords can be used to remember compounds)

But yeah, RTK is usually pretty polarizing. People either swear by it or at it.

And I think that there isn’t one only book which must be used to learn kanji. You must use different books in the different levels which you are during your personal evolution while learning kanji. (sorry my bad english, I hope that this means what I want to mean)

I think you can combine RTK with other books like this one:
http://www.lulu.com/content/1635336

And with japanese dictionarys and others.

While this isn’t the perfect set of books (in the earlier books they put kana beside the katakana), I have the Level 4 set and it is useful for my studies. Basically the premise is similar to the Graded Readers that Oxford puts out.

As for who can benefit from RTK, I’m tempted to say those that either know Japanese and know want more literacy (I’ve read about three or four articles that talk about being fluent but only having 700 kanji before using RTK). For beginners I honestly think that a reduced version of RTK would be better. Reason being, the method is seperate from the amount. The method works whether you go for 500, 1000 or 3000 kanji. Unfortunately, such a reduced list using the method doesn’t actually exist although it may in the future thanks to Reviewing the Kanji.

As for the lack of Graded Readers that adults can enjoy, I heartedly agree. As more sites come up, more people will link to the good ones. I too agree that extensive reading (well, and listening) will create a more fluent person.

here’s the レベル別日本語多読ライブラリー homepage.

I hope and pray to the linguistic gods that this library keeps growing. As a beginner it’s helping me immensely.

I firmly believe in extensive reading as the best (only?) way to learn a language effectively. I also believe the same applies to speech as well (extensive mimicry?), as in you should be mimicking every snippet of native speech out loud all the time, and even better if you have sentences that you can understand fully. These books offer both those things.

Granted, you don’t want to be going around talking like you’re narrating a story :p but it helps me so much with pronouncing all the basic common grammatical constructions. That’s been extremely important and helpful for me.