ありがとう！ makes a lot of sense ꒰(･‿･)꒱
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That such a bad advice for people that learn Japanese as a second language and want to be able to read. It’s the starting point for natives - they already know lots of words and their pronunciation before they start learning kanji. But If you’re just starting and don’t have any Japanese background, learning individual kanji and then some vocabs will make it much easier for you to deal with unfamiliar text.
I’m only level 19, and the way Wanikani introduces the kanji as a separate item and then as a part of a word, combined with their repeated mentions of
This is a jukugo word that uses the kun’yomi readings of the kanji
is having results, I not only can read new words I haven’t learned on the app, but I can guess their meaning correctly as well as their reading. I think it’s pretty remarkable.
However, for people who don’t have an inner voice when they read and rely on visual cues only pronunciation can be pretty useless reading wise unless you’re dealing with a word that is usually written in kana.
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I think for me every part of learning in wanikani is important.
Like how the meanings of radicals are like the building blocks to kanji, the meanings of the kanji are usually for most words are building blocks for vocabulary.
At a point in my immersion I have seen a lot of new words I have never seen or learned in wanikani. But they use the kanji, Wanikani has taught us, hence I am able to already know the readings and meanings of many words without much work.
For example, Take this word for example 行動派 This word will never be thought in wanikani but It’s individual parts are thaught 行動- action, 派 -sect . The word’s meaning is Active people.
I believe wanikani gives a certain base that allows you to be flexible, when you study outside of wanikani.
But that’s just my opinion I never had any problem with wanikani. 
Maybe some other methods might be more suitable for other’s.
What works for me, necessarily does not have to work for you.
Anyways Have a nice day 
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Not sure if it was your intention, but I could see a beginner reading this and being left with the impression that in order to do this sort of thing you need to “learn the Kanji readings” like wk has you doing. Whereas in reality, it’s much more like PM said where just learning vocabulary gives you this ability more or less without any explicit Kanji reading study.
Explicit study (as someone who has done both) never seemed to me like it offered any bonus skills. It was just a more scaffolded way to get there.
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That’s a good point, I think it’s a two way street: learning vocab has the side effect of teaching you the reading of kanji and vice versa. In fact there are a bunch of kanji whose reading I remember because of vocab and not the other way around (看護師 is one of those because the word popped up in an N5 Anki deck I was using long before I learned the individual kanji on WaniKani).
At this point it’s very unclear to me if one approach is superior to the other in objective terms. My intuition remains that for kanji that appear in many words and constructions, studying them in isolation is worthwhile. For more niche kanji I’m a lot less convinced.
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Thank you for providing this link.
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Learning the pronunciation is extremely helpful. As others have stated, it helps you be able to accurately read kanji compounds without having formally memorized the word. The other benefit is as you get more proficient, some words will use kanji that might be difficult to make appear using IME. If I know other readings and words that might be more common than the specific Jukugo, I can use the separate words I do know to make the kanji I need show up, and then just delete the unneeded okurigana and kanji.
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I think it’s valid to SRS vocabularies first, then Kanji reading(s) later, just that this isn’t vanilla WaniKani. (and don’t put radicals in SRS.)
Normally when I see a lone Kanji, I have some ideas of composed vocabularies too. And that’s how Kanji meanings are explained.
If you can’t find a better system that works, I think it’s ok to adapt the system, or work against the system a little.
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