I think I started running into the same issue I had with Anki. I am memorizing the cards!
This expresses itself in me being completely unable to remember the meaning of a word (or kanji) when WK is asking for the reading. When WK finally asks for the meaning, I somehow magically know it. The same happens the other direction as well. Of course, it’s not 100%. There are still lots of times when I enter the meaning for the pronunciation or vice versa.
It is possible that by the time I see the second half of a review, my brain has finished loading the word into memory. But it is really starting to feel like I am memorizing the word and the WK instruction text underneath.
Aside from “just read more,” is there any other advice? Am I just being paranoid? Anyone else experience this?
Brains are lazy, they’ll take any shortcut they can find. If they can make a quick contextual association, they will.
The good news is that it’s usually still valuable knowledge that will become more solid and reliable when you encounter and practice the word/kanji in more situations and your brain eventually forgets the card and only remembers the underlying concept.
So I guess that’s just a very roundabout way of saying “just read more”…
usually when i catch that sort of thing happening (also sometimes being able to read the word and having no clue what the composite kanji are, or as a separate problem guessing the meaning of a kanji based on a phonetic group which has a kanji with that meaning but having no clue which of these kanji is which), i intentionally fail the card and go look up the etymology and such which gives me a little more to grasp onto (usually if i can’t remember the word/kanji but can remember the card it’s because i didn’t spend enough time learning it in the first place)
usually its those kanji/vocabulary that i can only remember when WK gives them to me that i suddenly can’t read in context so i think it is an actual issue