I think I’m largely pretty much in agreement with Daisoujou here. I feel like if I wanted to, I could quit WK now and learn the rest of the kanji and vocab on my own through Anki (I’ve already proven to myself that I can do it). However, I would not have been able to do that at all without the base that WK gave me. It taught me how to look at kanji and see them in terms of radicals and such, as well as teaching me how to use mnemonics to memorize readings and meanings, plus so many countless other things.
But I’m not giving up WK and switching to Anki for a few reasons. One of them is that I don’t want to do a whole bunch of work that someone else has already done for me. There are some lesser used vocab words in WK, yes, but the vast majority are pretty common, and also I’m ultimately interested in broadening my vocabulary as much as possible, anyway, so I’m interested in learning more uncommon words as well.
I think other people have already pointed out that the vocab are usually how you end up remembering the kanji, anyway. That has certainly proven true for me. I’ll regularly fail reviews for isolated kanji, but pass all of my reviews for the vocab words that contain it. Also, unlike the OP, I absolutely need to spend more time SRSing stuff before it really sticks for me. Just a handful of reviews is not enough. And I like the する verbs and the words like 明朗 because they give me extra reps with the kanji readings without adding much to my daily cognitive load.
As far as WK SRS vs Anki’s SRS goes, both work just fine for me, in terms of learning the content. Anki is less stressful because it’s less punishing than WK, but I think there is some value in having to type out the words. WK gave me loads of practice typing in Japanese and also familiarizing myself with long vowels and such. As a beginner, that was very important, and I think it’s something I would be hazier on if I was using a less strict SRS. I still think I’m less prone to making mistakes when typing or writing WK words, because I had the correct reading drilled into my head. With Anki words, my recognition is fine, but when it comes to producing them, I’ll get the sound of the word generally right, but will occasionally make mistakes. So there is a trade-off, I think.
There is one major benefit to WK, though, that I don’t have in Anki, and that is the Keisei semantic-phonetic composition script. Honestly, that script alone makes WK completely worth it to me. Semantic-phonetic composition of kanji is absolutely something you can learn on your own, but I think WK is uniquely well-suited to teach it, because this program teaches so many kanji in a relatively short period of time, so it is quite easy to go from knowing almost nothing about it to developing a good eye for it purely from doing your WK lessons with no additional study. It would be possible to recreate this work in Anki, but adding this information to every kanji on your own would be extremely tedious.
In a similar vein, I’ve gotten a lot of value from the rendaku information script. Now when I see rendaku in new words I’m learning, I have a pretty good sense for it, and don’t have much trouble remembering it. That was a skill I developed, once again, purely from exposure over time. I’ve read Tofugu’s in-depth article on the subject, but the information didn’t really start to stick until after I’d been using this script for months.
I guess perhaps that falls under the OP’s criticism of WK being too reliant on scripts. I do think there is room for improvement here, especially with the scripts that just add extra information without changing the core functionality of the site.
Honestly, I think a huge part of the process of learning Japanese is learning how to learn Japanese. And part of that is discovering new tools that you didn’t know existed because you didn’t know where to look before. WK is definitely a very findable tool for absolute beginners, so I think a lot more people end up here than, say, making custom kanji decks on Anki. I’m not sure that efficiency is as easily quantifiable as people like to think, though, because often the most efficient route is not the most pleasant one, and for many people, that’s a recipe for burnout.
For me personally, I legitimately love learning kanji, and I love learning vocab. I even enjoy studying grammar in a textbook because I find it interesting! It’s not actually a significant cost to me to spend my time on SRS or with my textbook or practicing writing kanji or whatever because studying is legitimately an enjoyable activity to me. I regularly look forward to learning future kanji and vocab in WK.
Could I reach a higher level of Japanese skill going about this another way? Yes, surely. But as long as I’m enjoying what I’m doing and I’m steadily making progress, I’m completely fine with it. I don’t see the need to optimize everything. As long as I keep learning kanji, vocab, and grammar, I’ll eventually be able to read all of the things I want to read, and my listening comprehension and production are also gradually improving. I’m more interested in finding a method of learning that I can keep doing every single day for years. If it takes me five years to reach N1, that’s fine with me. I care more that I don’t burn out before then, and that I never reach a point where I stop working to improve. I want language learning to be a lifelong commitment.
In that sense, I agree that it’s bad for people to put too much in WK to the point where they neglect their other studies. I also think it’s bad for most people to go full speed (unless they already have a lot of Japanese knowledge, or they have an ungodly amount of free time to put into studying the language each day).
From what I’ve seen, many of the people who start as a beginner and go max speed end up reaching level 60 and basically stall out. They end up with the ability to read kanji, some several thousand vocab words, and… nothing else. Or they manage to complete level 60 alongside building their grammar knowledge, but fail to pick up an SRS habit (or another learning method) outside of WK, and stop progressing once they finish the program. In those cases, WK can be a bit of a crutch.
Ultimately my opinion is that the best method is the one that works for you. For some people, WK is that method! But if it is, it’s also good to think about what you’re going to do along with it and after it. Maybe Tofugu could be better at their messaging here than they are, but honestly I think the nature of the thing is you can repeat as many times as you want that learning kanji is only part of learning Japanese, and that WK is essentially training wheels that at some point will need to come off, but a lot of the users will still fail to internalize that. Gamification can be incredibly motivating, but the flipside of that is that “winning” the game can easily become more important than actually learning the language.
