I’d like to point out that you do a lesson 1 time, and then review it at least 8 times, (4 apprentice, 2 guru, 1 master, 1 enlightened) and those reviews do not come in a specific order unless you are forcing them to (which means that in reviews sometimes you will get reading before meaning, and other times you will get meaning before reading). I sort of doubt that the ordering of this 1 lesson is having such a huge impact on this. It’s more about understanding your weak points and creating good study habits to overcome them. OP said that he struggled with readings so now during reviews he forces himself to read first, for both reading and meaning. If you have a similar struggle you could try the same. If you have different struggles then you need to come up with other methods to overcome them.
Wanikani is a great tool, but you still need to figure out how to use it for you to get the best results.
For what it’s worth, the reorder script can force readings to appear before meanings in lesson reviews. Of course you oughtn’t misuse it, but it might be helpful for you if you want to always practice readings first.
Well I’m not sure if you did any of this before level 60, but the starting point is tough for everyone no matter what level they complete.
I see what you mean, but for a lot of the vocabulary one can almost guess what the reading is because they have already studied the kanji reading from before getting to the vocabulary lessons. Obviously, that’s not always the case, such as with single kanji vocabulary words (水) that have separate readings or kanji compounds with irregular readings (台詞). I feel that the tendency to have a better sense of readings comes from being accustomed to the readings learned from kanji lessons. For this reason, I’m not sure how teaching the reading first, then the meaning would counteract some people’s natural inclination to anticipate how vocabulary should be read. Kanji from earlier levels appear in later level’s lessons, thus making it easier to remember the readings. Unfortunately, that kind of transfer is not so easily attained with vocabulary meanings. I have found that when this has happened, working on reconciling this separation was worked out by interacting with the language (reading, writing, speaking, and listening) away from WK. Because in such cases, you’re not presented with the meaning at all. Specifically with reading, you’re not presented even with a way to pronounce the kanji if there’s no furigana.
I’ve been doing the same since I started wanikani! In essence this means we recall reading twice for every time we recall meaning.
When I’m reading Japanese, I usually just read without thinking about the meaning at all. When I don’t know the reading, I stare at the Kanji and try to guess, and then usually skip to read the rest of the sentence and maybe figure it out by context. Second go through I’ll look up the reading (and meaning, because I’m not using a monolingual dictionary)
The meaning is sort of just there in the back of my mind.
From a pedagogical perspective, the going linguistics data pretty well indicates that it’s best to learn words by first recognizing pronunciation and contextual meaning, and only later learning to read and write them, so I think you actually are on the right track. But that said, according to the research its actually best to already have a good grasp of what a word means and it’s pronunciation before you ever try to learn the kanji, though this seems to be the exact opposite of how most people do it. Interestingly, most people also seem to have a really hard time to learn foreign languages, so maybe there’s a connection there…
In essence this means we recall reading twice for every time we recall meaning.