I agree with Niklas. Some people study radicals, some people don't. I personally have never really studied radicals, but you still start to learn trends without putting in a lot of effort. You just have to decide whether learning the radicals will actually help you remember the kanji in the long run or not.

If you've heard of Wanikani, its method is basically to assign "stories" to each radical then use those stories to help you remember the kanji. I use a similar method, I just make up my own stories. Whether those stories have anything to do with the actual meaning of the radical is up to you. Kanji Damage also does the same thing. 

I guess that somehow depends on your personal preferance. I often heard that it's even better to learn the radicals before starting with kanji because then you can memorize kanji easily by memorizing of which radicals it is made. By this you can tell similiar looking kanji apart and even somehow make a connections from the radicals meanings to the kanjis meaning (but this depends on your imagination).
e.g. the site <a href="http://www.kanjidamage.com/">http://www.kanjidamage.com/</a>; tries to teach kanji that way (and yeah, the type of language the creator uses is a bit colloquial and cynical but I like it as a reference)

But on the other hand you can also memorize kanji in a difference way (so memorizing each kanji for itself and make your own connections between them) etc.

I personally think that radicals can be a good indicator and helper but for myself I chose to not memorize them beforehand. Now I'm looking a bit at them to make for myself connections but otherwise... well, I do the "just learn each kanji" thing. However, I think radicals can help, especially if you wanna have a general gist of what the kanji want's to tell you (like maybe 池　酒　泳 having all smth to do with water) or how it is read because one radical is carrying the reading (池　地 maybe because their on-yomi is read ち) but it's not always this case.

But what you do, depends on you in the end^^"