As of reaching level 20 on WK I’ve started to dip my toes in immersion and sentence mining with Anki.
Whenever I mine a vocab using kanji I’ve already seen and studied through WK, it goes very well and I can quickly memorise its meaning and integrate the association between the meaning and the reading.
When the inverse happens, I’ve been struggling a lot with the reading. Since I am only level 20 and WK doesn’t use frequecy ordering, this is happening quite frequently. Once again, meaning is not really a problem, as the sentece usually provides a lot of context and help me recall the meaning. But trying to memorize the reading feels very disconnected.
What helps sometimes is to go see the kanji entries in WK. But if it is a kanji that is part of later levels, there is a chance that the mnemonics and components won’t make any sense to me. Sometimes I go down the rabbit hole of checking the radicals, then the kanji the radicals are based on and the radicals of said kanji, etc, but this can get quite long and overwhelming.
My main tip is to minimise the amount of information you are trying to recall at once.
If your issue is associating the reading with the kanji, then the prompt should include both the reading and the meaning and any additional information that helps you (context, similar words that it isn’t, synonyms etc).
I don’t personally use wanikani and my need for additional context information is one of the reasons I build my own decks in anki.
Make sure to pay attention to the phonetic components, that can help memorize the onyomi of new kanji very easy if things line up.
But generally I was often faced with this issue when I was still going through WaniKani, I used it as motivation to level up faster to reach those kanji on the platform. I only started seriously mining things on Anki later.
I think I didn’t express myself clearly. I am sentence mining so I am memorizing vocab readings, not kanji readings in itself. It is just that without the Wanikani “primer”, the readings of said vocab stay very fuzzy in my brain and I have a hard time to remember them.
I will try to create additional cards for the kanji though, just to get a feeling for them, as you suggested, maybe this will help my brain to get used to them before properly studying them through WK.
If you’re open to yet another SRS jpdb proposes to teach the kanjis through sub-vocabulary and thus you cut time on creating cards (but customizing them is still a thing).
As for being overwhelmed with branching content I have no easy answers, I find that in the long run the deeper understanding of the radicals etymology the more it all makes sense so I like spending time on the sub-component and kanjis but it is very time consuming.
I don’t know if you’re aware but Anki has separate concepts of “notes” and “cards”, meaning that you can generate several cards from the same note. So from a single kanji note you can have a card to prompt the reading, one for the meaning and maybe also reverse cards where you get a meaning and have to remember the kanji for instance.
