On a more serious note- after the first 1,000 kanji or so, I gave up learning the English meaning for the kanji, under recommendation from my wife (native Japanese, doesn’t speak English at all. she doesn’t know the “meanings” for most kanji either) and started only learning the readings and words for the kanji. it helps build relations with the actual kanji and not just trying to figure out the English meaning for words.
Take 映画 as an example (since someone else also used it as an example) if you know it’s English meaning is “movie” then turn around and see a kanji like 画面 you can see it has something in relation to movies as they share a kanji. Doesn’t matter if you can’t piece it together from there, you can just type in 映画 delete the 映 and just leave in 画, on places like jisho or renshuu, you can just search for words using that kanji to find it’s friend, or if you know 面談 or something else, you can fill in that second kanji. Apparently this strategy is quite popular with Japanese folk when they don’t recognize a kanji or don’t know the reading for a kanji.
Working like this has saved quite a bit of time when I dedicate time to studying kanji (Which is admittedly rather rare these days, I normally just read books for any kanji practice I need and learn the vocab instead.) mostly saving the headache of trying to remember why kanji like 約 means promise, shrink, or approximately. just that 約束 is promise 約数 is division (math) and 契約書 is contract. it just saves more time to study actual vocabulary than studying kanji.