This is NOT a post dissing Wanikani, I'm just not sure what exactly it's supposed to do.
I've been learning kanji just by memorizing a ton of words and its associated pronunciations, which has worked. I can pretty comfortably read anything now even if there are some words I still don't know. I can also "guess" the reading or meaning and be correct much of the time.
I used Wanikani before but I've forgotten about it until I saw a different post here recently. I'm wondering whether I should start it again, but I'm also not sure how it would help in the first place.
The main confusion I have is that even if you spend all these hundreds of hours learning the kunyomi and onyomi…. practically every single one of them will have several common words that aren't actually read that way, so you'll have to learn those words individually anyway. So if you can't be sure that the kunyomi or onyomi will be accurate, why even learn them first? Why not just spend those same X hundred hours memorizing real words? I know Wanikani also teaches you words but why bother with the kanji part at all.
If my memory serves me correctly, Wanikani is a HUGE time sink in doing all the reviews every day… on top of Anki or JPDB as you go through the Top 5000 deck or sentence-mine from native material. My question is why even do Wanikani when you can just use that time to learn more words and have less reviews daily?
Again not trying to diss Wanikani, I know many people find it helpful. I'm just not sure HOW it's helpful
edit: forgot to mention another aspect, that when I started reading I noticed there were a LOT and I mean A LOT of kanji that are not in the 2200 or so that Wanikani covers so that makes it feel even more pointless? I can't explain it well but I feel like Wanikani would in fact really help me, but I also don't want to waste time if it won't. So I'm trying to learn more about what its benefits actually are
by somersaultandsugar