Can totally relate, it’s annoying that our brains tend to pay such a metagame. I caught myself quite a few times remembering words by their connections to another word I have learned in the same batch instead of proper recognition.
I believe the only workaround here is to meet these words in a context to allow a better pattern to be constructed. I haven’t found a proper way to incorporate more context in the reviews though.
There are userscripts that target this problem, but I honestly cannot force myself to read a whole sentence for every item during a review. I mean I already glazed over the needed word and kinda recognized it, so reading a sentence feels a real drag.
P.S. I mean reading a lot and waiting for a word to occur in a natural material is also a possibility, but my impressions are – it’s quite hard to match the pure amount wanikani pours on me. Also taking into account the thing that wanikani sometimes have a peculiar vocab that can be hard to find in a beginners’ material (but there are always plenty equally weird words though, just not from wanikani), yeah that kinda makes me feel hopeless.