I am by no means a Japanese expert learner, but I am having much better luck just memorizing real vocab without that intermediate step.
As someone pointed out about the much famed "Remebering the Kanji", you could remeber all the kanji perfectly and still not be able to read Japanese, because Japanese kanji is not equivelant to vocabulary. Actual words, pronunciation and meaning all change when you combine kanji into words.
It's good tangential knowledge to shore up your learning, but it's not something you should spend your entire focus on before you start learning the actual language of Japanese.
You want to memorize in usage order as you are, nominally, an adult. You understand complex concepts and have developed motor skills. There is little point in learning in the order that a child would.
> it's not something you should spend your entire focus on before you start learning the actual language of Japanese This is also true. You can do both. In fact I think you /should/ do both, learning new vocabulary using the kanji you've learned so far to help motivate you to learn more. It's quite addicting when you can see your progress day-to-day.
...and of course I still fell off the wagon after a few months, came back to a backlog in the thousands, and have had tremendous trouble getting back on the wagon.