I did WaniKani up until level 5, but gave up because many of the mnemonics were too hard to remember. I wound up with huge piles of cards that simply would not stick, due to mnemonics that did not make sense to me.
I’ve done a little practice on Kanji Koohii, and it’s night and day. The community-submitted mnemonics on Kanji Koohii work much, much better for me.
As a completely randomly-chosen example, take 護.
On WaniKani, 護 is known as “defend”, with the following mnemonic:
They say that flowers held by a turkey on a stool are good to defend yourself with. Even better than a guard dog they say. People are so confused by the turkey sitting on a stool holding flowers that they just lose their will to fight. This turkey is great to defend yourself and your home.
On Kanji Koohii, 護 is known as “safeguard”, the top two community-submitted mnemonics are:
Think of the flower-vessels as a the Greenpeace vessel “Arctic Sunrise”, only instead of a rainbow there is a big flower painted on the hull (this will come back in 獲 (#757) and 穫 (#974)). Think of “flower-power” and of the “peace” in “Greenpeace” and it will make some sense hopefully. – In this kanji, we see an inauguration speech being given before the Greenpeace vessel is set afloat and sent to safeguard our planet.
And:
Words and Flowers are exchanged between sailors and their wives before they board the vessel to safeguard the world.
I don’t think the WaniKani mnemonic for 護 looks good in comparison. The keywords are simply juxtaposed with next to no connection. The scene makes little sense, making it hard to remember.
In comparison, the community-submitted mnemonics on Kanji Koohii are creative, vivid, and cohesive.
I much prefer the approach of learning readings along with vocabulary, but it’s just too hard with mnemonics that don’t make sense. Of course, the WaniKani staff create all the mnemonics, whereas Kanji Koohii mnemonics are submitted by users. It would be nice if the ability to submit, share, and vote on custom mnemonics to WaniKani was added.
This would have the nice side-effect of making it less resource-intensive to add new vocabulary and readings to WaniKani, since the WaniKani staff could rely on the community to come up with new mnemonics.