I also read the guide when I began and liked the idea of waiting until level 10 and having a base of kanji knowledge before starting grammar. In practicality…it was a waste of time. The problem is that Wanikani limits your pace to their own schedule, and especially for those first weeks when you have the most motivation and the least amount of reviews to do each day…you have nothing to do with your study time. Even at max speed, it takes around 7 weeks to hit level 10, I believe. Plenty of people finish the entire Genki I in 3 or 4 months if they’re moving quickly in self study, so waiting months before even beginning seems wasteful unless your study time is heavily restricted.
Definitely get comfortable with both hiragana and katakana first thing, and I’d suggest being familiar with all the Genki vocab before starting that chapter while moving forward with Wanikani. Remember that while knowing what the kanji in a word means makes memorization of vocab so much easier, Genki doesn’t even introduce kanji as a concept until lesson 3, and continues to use furigana all the way through. If you are interested in connecting the kanji with their meaning from the start, you can always plug the kanji right into Wanikani’s search option, then add the meaning and even paste the mnemonics right onto your Anki cards. I don’t do it on every card, but here’s an example from my personal deck from when I was having trouble with a specific card :
You can see I have the Kanji meanings under the kanji, then added some mnemonics to the bottom. This is all on the back of the card, so it doesn’t clutter up the front.
I also highly recommend learning common sequences separately from flashcards. Numbers, time, ages, days of the week, months of the year, etc. I tried to learn these with Wanikani and Anki…it went very poorly. Turns out it’s difficult to create sequential order when you only see things in isolation. Learn them in the order they’re intended and then you can visualize the list much easier as you see them in context. This would be a good thing to start on early if you do decide to level up on Wanikani before starting grammar. Genki has clock time and age at the end of chapter 1, and calendar time at the end of chapter 4.
As for self studying Genki, I did Genki I on my own, then paid to take 201 at the local college with the first half of Genki II, then finished the book on my own. I didn’t find I learned reading or grammar any better in a classroom than I did at home. I watched Tokini Andy’s lesson videos for each chapter and did the workbook and I did all the group activities either on my own or I skipped over. Amusingly, the class also skipped over most of these exercises, in favor of cultural lessons and dialogue readings, or assigned them as homework where we had to record ourselves doing one or both parts - by ourselves. So much for pair work! Obviously the class was best for speaking and listening skills, but as far as whether Genki is effective for self study, my vote is yes if you’re looking for the ability to read and write.
