I am planning on starting the Genki textbook soon (I have the second edition) and am wondering what to do about the kanji section. After flipping through it, it seems like the exercises are just ways to practice recognizing and recalling the kanji, and are also rather short. From a couple past threads it seems like there is a general consensus that it is reasonable to skip it, but there didn’t seem to be a definitive answer. Will I be safe disregarding it, or is there anything important I would be missing out on?
The order of the kanji in Genki does not exactly match the order in WK, so you might want to double-check whether there are any unfamiliar ones in your Genki chapters that you’d want to learn on the side. (But even if you don’t learn them now, you will eventually get to them in WK anyways.)
Other than that, I don’t think you’d be missing out on much as Genki does not heavily focus on the kanji anyways (if I remember correctly). On the other hand, it does not really do much harm to get some kanji “refresher” with each chapter, so it’s totally up to you whether you just skip those parts or whether you check them out quickly.
I think it’s reasonable to skip the kanji section. In a few levels you’ll have covered most of the kanji in Genki anyways, and they put furigana on most kanji words, so even if you don’t know the kanji you should be fine. You won’t really be missing out on anything by skipping the kanji section.
If all you need to learn kanji for is reading, you’ll probably be just fine skipping. If for some reason you also need to know how to write kanji, Wanikani by itself won’t teach you everything you need to know.
Wanikani will teach you to recognize kanji as you come across them. Genki also does that as well as teaching you how to write them (stroke orders and such). Wanikani will teach you the radicals for kanji, whereas (iirc) Genki does not.
Keep in mind though that Genki 1 only has around 300~ish kanji in the back of the book, which is about the same as 10 levels on Wanikani (it’s not a 1-to-1 list, but just for reference.) and If you’re going lesson by lesson I believe that they introduced new kanji rather slowly.
Thanks for all the advice. I think I will go ahead and skip it, and as far as the writing section, I will probably disregard it for now and learn writing through another source at a later time.