So, I’ve never done WK, but the learning path I took started with in-person classes conducted only in Japanese right from the start, where they were quite keen on students not thinking of things in terms of English word → Japanese word (e.g. they taught basic vocab with flashcards that had pictures, not English words). Partly as a result of that, I’ve never done any memorization/SRS work in that direction.
I think that although “memorize English-to-Japanese” can seem a good idea initially, there are a couple of problems with it that you’re likely to run into:
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the mapping between words is not 1:1, so although in simple cases like ‘snow == ゆき’ it can work out OK, you’re going to find there are a lot of English words where there seem to be multiple Japanese words you could reasonably use depending on context and you’re going to forget which one your SRS is asking for. (See the recent thread about there being a lot of words for ‘neighbourhood’ for one example.)
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in order to be able to read, write, listen or speak reasonably smoothly, you need your brain to be working purely in Japanese[*]. You can’t start with a thought in English, mentally translate it and then say it, and you can’t read by mentally translating into English. Memorizing English → Japanese mappings feels to me like it’s trying to go down a path where you still have English as a part of your Japanese language activity. (Japanese->English is less bad for this because the ‘English’ answer side of an SRS card can have multiple words, indications of separate senses, etc – it’s really a “Japanese → meaning” card.)
[*] I think this is really what my initial class teachers were getting at with their emphasis on not using English – they wanted to get students into thinking in Japanese without mental translation as fast as possible.