For katakana specifically it might be worthwhile to alter the flashcards to include multiple readings. シ can be shi, si, or ci. チ can be chi or ti, etc. Thinking of katakana like this might help fix the look of the word feeling alienated from its sound?
Not sure I follow. How can the kana have multiple readings? For ti there is a dedicated combination, for instance in ミーティング. Or do you mean the kana can be equivalent to multiple readings in English? Usually the transcription is 1:1 so that’s unlikely.
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For romaji, when you have to read it. If you’re thinking in terms of pure translation into kana, skipping romaji, yes the digraphs come naturally.
On another note, I was busy typing this out, but for fun and curiosity just last week, I made a list of English words I thought Japanese people would have the most difficulty in given the disparity in phonemes and vowel sounds. Here’s one of them:
ノームルシー Isn’t that quite a train wreck that makes one long for the normalcy of hiragana? 
I just checked and it’s actually ノーマルシー. Yes, these are kind of tricky, but not impossible I guess?
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Start with hiragana. Personally I didn’t use an app, I just did them 5 at a time (following the columns) writing them over and over again. Every day I would add another column.
I did the same for katakana but the difficulty is that katakana are a bit trickier to distinguish (a lot of similar characters) and, especially with beginner material, you don’t get a ton of exposure to them whereas hiragana are all over the place so you’ll get a lot of practice.
To help with that I used this anki deck: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2015522924
By the time I was done with the thousand flashcards my katakana proficiency had increased massively.
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Haha you caught me. I’m "m"yslexic with my katana 
I still make that mistake from time to time.
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I was a little surprised myself, because ノーマルシー made more sense to me, but some words like キングダム are a little more wonky to me. I would think it’s キンゴダム, but キングダム makes more sense as it’s “king” + “dom”.
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As a non-native English speaker this stuff is nightmarish for me because I have to effectively go through two layers of foreign accents to parse that stuff.
So you have a word like ‘airmail’, as a Frenchie with a bad English accent I’m thinking “エルメイル” but no, it’s エアメール. Like I just have to look it up every single time because my French brain refuses to think of “air” as “éa” without rhothic. That’s just not possible.
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If you like mnemonics (which you may well do as you’re on on WaniKani!), then JapanesePod101’s youtube channel has good videos for all hiragana and katakana. Helped me a lot in the beginning to quickly memorise the kana
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