>>863
Ah, missed your question (it's late here and I'm about to sleep).
The point of RTK is to learn the general meaning (and perhaps more importantly, writing of including stroke order) of the kanji, and learn it fast. I can assure you that as you begin to use the kanji more and more in actual Japanese, the English keywords will fade because you will have stronger connections between the kanji and pronunciation as well as its connotations than the English keyword.
There are people in both camps, but I've seen so many people who know a whole lot of Japanese but know less than 500 kanji (while I know an estimated 3500 so far + more Japanese than them because I can read everything) that I think you should just get it over with, counterproductive or not.