Well, the characters are useless by themselves. I made myself a deck that contains both kanji and the words made from these kanji [1]. This way I can learn how to read the characters within various words, although it would take much longer to learn all the kanji. I'm currently only up to the 4th grade level or so after many months of learning, but the ones I did learn, I feel like I know them pretty well and can easily read them in various contexts.

[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/831167744