You couldn't be more wrong honestly. It's way way easier using mnemonics, especially when you can personalize the stories to things that matter to you. Go study Japanese out of the standard textbook (Genki) and tell me how you pick up any of the kanji the way they show it just as graphics to copy (it's a great book aside from the garbage kanji presentation).
Visual memory sucks, the vast majority of people will never be able to remember these symbols and their stroke order just from seeing and repe ion of writing unless they're Japanese kids drilling it for ten years, six days a week at school. The stories help you break things down into smaller parts that are easier to remember and work as short term memory with the goal of getting it to rote via SRS (spaced repe ion system). I have been studying kanji for three weeks now (~ 2 hours day) and I have about 550 down that I can write, understand, and recognize when reading Japanese thanks to these stories and organization that comes from a book called Remembering the Kanji by Heisig. Doing my SRS flash card deck weighted towards the ones I know worst (using a program called Anki) I'm getting about 95% of them right when doing batches of 100. ing blows me away because I always struggled with memory back in college (one time enrolled in a psychobio course for the GE credits and saw 30 definitions on the power point on the first day of class and said this and dropped it for another course instead
). Don't feel bad, I thought it sounded like bull too at first.
You have to know the 2200 jouyou kanji (means general use Chinese characters, it's a list created by Japan's equivalent to our Dept of Education) to be literate.