Well, you’re comparing the most basic couple thousand of words in the frequency list against the greater whole and saying that it will be a consistent experience. Verbal phrases are looming on the horizon, and they would like a word with you.
When you are performing lookups so often because a friend or teacher isn’t going to be there the majority of the time, it defeats the purpose of having sunk so much time into a mostly purely kanji approach. The problem with learning kanji in isolation is that you’d have to memorize all of the applicable readings, and for some kanji (生 for instance) that is less feasible, versus learning a word that may be the only time that kanji or specific reading ever appears.