I know I’m years too late on this but… y’all are scaring me over here
Wanikani should always be used as your protein powder, it isn’t the workout
I do find, even at level 5, that the majority of my mistakes are because wanikani wants me to phrase the answer a very specific way and this causes a huge slowdown in the review process.
Also Wanikani has a ton of silly words that should just be skipped like the numerous times they make you name how many machines there are.
yes/no review style is very effective when backed up it’s backed up with tons of immersion practice. You may be only vaguely remembering a word, but as long as you can come up with a close definition at all it proves you in some way know the word already. Hearing the word later while watching immersion content will help reinforce your understanding
Tldr; please don’t use Wanikani as your only source of study, it’s much more important to get practice hearing and actually internalizing your target language than just mass studying vocabulary.
Also the end goal of learning a language is not to understand the language through the lens of your native language, it’s to have an internal understanding of the language.