A fair point. I decided to check the script for part of a visual novel I read to see what that was like.
織女星 x1
女子 x6
彼女 x16
女性 x4
女の子 x13
女湯 x2
男女 x1
女王 x5
少女 x1
Total おんな readings: 15
Total じょ readings: 34
So yeah, still goes with what I was saying.
Link to the script for transparency:
Well, now that I think of it, the “real world” frequency of a particular reading for a kanji isn’t really relavent to which one wanikani should teach first anyway. Because wanikani actually tries to teach you all the common readings, even the exceptional ones, by way of vocab.
And teaching you the reading most common among the vocab its going to teach you later seems like a good way to smooth the process over, but now I’m just repeating what other people are saying
I’ll concede that point happily. Now, is it a steamy novel? 
Jokes aside, to roll with the whole reading thing, i find things like Boruto manga excellent for learning the ropes, the language used is not that off the cuff as far as how young people actually speak (magical ninja tricks nonwithstanding) as it’s a manga aimed at roughly the teenage market or so, and if they can’t familiarize with the language, they’re probably not gonna be the audience.
Read the script and find out :3
I’ve tried many other resources (including the other big mnemonics based one, Remembering the Kanji) and WK pushed me through my plateau phase of kanji learning.
It’s not the only thing I use. I use the Kanken Training games, though they’re far from perfect, and several apps.
And it only took me a year and 30 days to get to level 60 in WK, which I think is a short amount of time to learn 2000 kanji. It’s only the first levels that are considered slow.
This thread is pretty far out now, but re: helpful mnemonics that deal with vowel length, Kanji Damage uses a system where long vowels get a sound based mnemonic, eg しゅう would get “shoe” as a mnemonic phrase, but しゅ would get a SHU acronym. So for 主 it could be something like “The master worked very hard to feed and Save His Underlings.”
Something you can do to practice:
Find any youtube video where a native japanese person is teaching you how to say things and the hiragana or kanji is subtitled (there is a ton of stuff like this). Preferably not one where they are speaking artificially slowly (nihongonomori grammar youtube videos would be a good choice). close your eyes, listen to the person speak the sentence, rewind and look at the written text they just pronounced, repeat, try to reproduce it yourself.
I think you will find Japanese is not “spoken exactly as written” despite many claims to the contrary. But what you will also discover is that the ways in which it is not spoken as it is written are regular and with practice you can pronounce Japanese with a resonable accent.
If you want to nerd out on it:
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