I can only recomment "remembering the kanji" by James W Heisig. He explains that children only learn 80 in a year because they have to learn through repetition, which is highly inefficient. Adults have to make more efforts to memorize stuff but can conceptualize what they do, and in fact it makes it easier to learn the kanji.
So far I've learned 350 in a month using this method about 1h per day. According to the book you can learn the 2042 basic kanji in 6 weeks if you do it full time.