First of all:

1-I put the kanji on the front and the real meaning (idea) of the kanji on the back
2- I’m not waste my time writing them
3- I change the fonts and color background of my deck using the tips of this post: japaneselevelup.com/2012/03/17/boosting-ankis-power-with-media-enhancements-3-graphics/
(seriously I highly recommend you to change the fonts and color of your deck)

Method:

My method is the “movie method” drmoviemethod.blogspot.com.br/ it let me able to learn the a kanji AND its most common on-reading without any additional time

The site already gives a lot of information, so I’ll just resume my experience with the method in a little FAQ:

1-Learning readings and meanings at the same time seems like a lot of extra work

I though this in the first time I saw this method, “how it’s possible to learn more information at the same time??” but when I finally put it in practice I realize I was learning the kanjis more easier than with heisig, because I was making stories with things that I like instead of just coping and pasting stories from the reviewing the kanji, but just that doesn’t mean nothing, you can use things you like to make stories with the heisig method too. What makes you learn (almost) without extra time is the fact that you already use characters and places in your stories, you don’t put the compounds on a white background, you mix them with random characters and places to make the story more vivid, the only difference is that using this method you will start to pick up those characters and places from a specific theme that represents a reading

2-I don’t need this shit, I can learn the readings from context

Yes mah boy, you can learn the readings from context, and the kanji as well, but this method (almost) doesn’t add any time or effort to the “traditional” method to learn kanji thorough memonics so why not give it a try?

3-Do you really need to use movies to make the stories?

No, I never use movies, I just use animes and games, the important is to have something with a “theme” to associate with the reading. (you can even use places and people that you met in your real life)

4-Do you use RTK kanji order or group them based on their readings? (e.g. learning all the kanjis with the フreading and then learning all the kanjis with the ケイ reading…)

I group them based on their reading. mainly because it’s easier to deal with new compounds appearing all the time than deal with new themes (readings) appearing all the time, and I already know a lot of compounds ( I was in the #800 kanji with the heisig).

5-Do you create new compounds as they appear to you like the creator of the method?

No, I use heisig’s compounds because they are very good ( they make almost all kanjis have just 2~3 parts) and they are already there so I don’t need to spend time creating them, however I change the meaning of the compound if it don’t refer to a concrete object, so it becomes more easy to visualize in my mind

6-The creator of the method said that is better to place the compounds in a scene, but I don’t know many scenes from my animes/movies/games. (or them don’t have any scene at all)

Using scenes is a better choice because you already know them so no need to create a new story from the scratch, but if you can’t find a scene that fits with the compounds of the kanji or its meaning just make a story à la heisig using the characters and/or places of your “theme” and the compounds, this already is good enough.

7-I already know a lot of kanji thanks to heisig and I don’t want to make all those stories again

You don’t need to make new stories, you can:
1-Just put the characters/places of your “theme” in the story of the kanji
OR
2-Use the keyword of the kanji to create a new story

in both way you will be able to learn several readings pretty quickly, in the 1 way you will be just adding new suff to story that’s already there, and in the 2 way you will be just dealing with one compound (the keyword) to make a short and simple story

8-Should I learn more than 1 reading per kanji?

Based on my personal experience, no. More than 1 readings per kanji make the story too complex and add more effort to the process, and since most of the kanjis have just one common reading the second reading may not be useful enough to pays off the effort to learn it. The propose of this method is not make you able to recognize every reading of every kanji, is to reduce drastically the amount of new information that you will have to learn in your sentences so you just need to focus on the readings you don’t know

9-The “theme” should have something that remember you of the reading associate with it?

Again, based on my personal experience, no. All my themes have nothing to do with their readings (except for the anime ソウルイーター that I associated with the ソウ reading), if you group the kanjis by their readings and learn all the kanjis with reading X before go to learn the kanjis with reading Y the theme is associate with the reading quite naturally

Final notes:

I spend that time writing this post because I really believe that this method can really revolutionize the way we learn kanji, making a total beginner who just finish RTK have a “reading knowledge” of a person who already know thousands of words, like the creator of the method said:

“Another big thing is learning vocab. Words that use onyomi are practically memorized already. You guys think learning 飛行機 is easy when you know “Fly – Go – Machine”. Imagine how easy it is when you also know the readings. ひ – こう – き.”

I really want that khatzumoto make a post about it. The people on this site need to know about this method.

Thanks in advance for your time and help!

Try Anki Shared Deck – “Lazy Kanji Mod V2”. I made the kanji invisible until you select it.

At this point, 3 months into sentences, and with less than 80 of my RtK1 cards (kendo format) immature in Anki, I remember very few of the stories I used to learn the Kanji, but yet I’m reading Manga and playing text heavy video games without any Kanji-related problems.

Don’t make it harder than it needs to be. Make Japanese as easy and as fun as possible, and you’ll progress really quickly — way quicker than if you kill yourself trying.

Sorry for double post, but… an error, you know :/

But first some introduction: I’m now on 1200th frame of RTK (1199 to be exact), I have tried the ‘vanilla’, ‘Lazy Mod’ and also some other formats, which were abbreviations of those. Up to around 1000th frame I’ve wrote each kanji before showing an answer. It was good, couse my writing ability increased. But unfortunately it was also SLOW (20-30 sec per answer), one and a half an hour of SRSing a day… plus the time for input stuff… Fulltime job.

I got sick of it, so now I’m only writing character once after making the story and putting it to SRS (actually from now on I will be handwriting kanji AFTER SRS session, and just the new ones of course). Now it’s ~10 sec fer character avg. and ~30 min of SRSing in total.
Also the session limit changed. Used to be 10 min, then 2 and now it’s 3 min and I think this is optimal for me. 3 min is great, couse you get done something like 15-20 reps – it’s a visible progress, but you don’t get tired (3 min, seriously, pffff…)

Da. I could write some more, but I guess no one even cares, so here is what I came up with, nothing revolutionary(is there even a word like this in English?). This resides somewhere between Kendo’s Lazy plus Mod, Tommy’s version, and the ‘vanilla’ format.
It’s Keyword+Primitives=>Kanji+Story

Sample:

[Front]

Lead
Metal| Gully

[Back]

鉛

Picture the molten lead (the heavy metal) being discreetly drained out of the factory into a gully behind. {Story by samusam from koohii.com}

Scoring (Anki 0-3):
3 – Story pops up in your head along with the correct image of the kanji.
2 – Kanji is good, but you don’t get the story remembered.
1 – You got the good story, but kanji is messed up somehow, or you’re just inconfident in remembering this one.
0 – This one is the least used by me, couse choosing 1 (hard) shorten the time of next appearance, so eventually it will be short enough for you to remember (plus why demage the good stats? ;p). Using almost exclusively when confusing completly new characters.

This is easier than ‘vanilla’ keyword=>kanji, couse you get hint from primitves (plus a hint about placing the elements – ‘|’ is ‘next to’, ‘/’ is ‘under’, ‘[‘ ‘enclosure’, ‘\’ ‘semienclosure’ like road, etc.), but still you need to reproduce entire story and the kanji. This is supposedly (‘in my opinion’; I just don’t want to use the forbidden ‘S’ word… xD) better in long run, couse you get your brain working for each answer, and I think this is kind of what Mr Heisig meant urging(?) us to go keyword=>kanji.
Tommy’s version also does some good, but I’m too lazy to make cloze to each card 😉

I’m really just starting this today, so if there will be some long term effects, I’ll let you know. If anyone like/ dislike this, post comment here or at my blog (-_-)/~

Here’s a suggestion that worked for me. Why not cloze-delete the kanji? That way, there’s absolutely no danger of looking at it; after you turn the card around, you’ll see the kanji.

Or you could just put only the story on front and try to produce the kanji and keyword through the story.

Loving all of this. Long time first time — OK, so I’m a cheater of sorts – or at least I have wandering eyes. When I read to read the story first I THOUGHT it was cheating but I actually found that trying to come up with the kanji from story reading just forced me to memorize the story even more which is all you really need! I tested myself by doing the regular set of Heisig front first and back first and I was amazed. Even if I “struggle (chortle)” with the Lazy Mod deck I find that when I switch over to the regulars I have them down!

MY PROBLEM IS I would REALLY like to read the story without danger of looking at the kanji above AT ALL! I just can’t help but 50% of the time sneak a peak or a lot of the time I can even pick up the basic structure of it in my “perifs” or peripheral vision. I have come up with a solution (but not for mobile devices:( ). COVER THE KANJI with a digital sticky note. I have a MAC aptly called jMac. I opened my sticky app that comes with OS X and I moved a sticky note ALL THE WAY to the top until it couldn’t go any higher. SECOND, and this is the key, you set the menu option Note > Floating Window (AKA Always on Top) so that the sticky note will never go behind another window. THEN I positioned my ANKI just so that the kanji above the story is covered. So, now, I can go through with ease without fear of “cheating.” If I need to see the kanji I just move the note and it’s EASY TO PUT BACK because it’s ALREADY ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP and it can’t go any further – so I just slide it back and forth – try it. Super simple. If you’re on Windows or Linux I’d guarantee there are TONS of programs like these or you can just use ANY program window that you can set to be FLOATING WINDOW or ALWAYS ON TOP. This method is much better than poking your eyes out to keep them from wandering. Lemme know if you need clarification.