Hold tight. After you ‘guru’ your vocab, you’ll be using those reading in the vocab. It’s not wasted time for progressing in wanikani or in learning Japanese in general.
And as @lsh3rd pointed out, if you feel you really don’t want/need the readings, then Heisig’s Learning the Kanji perhaps in conjunction with anki for SRS might be better for your needs.
Obviously you’re being 皮肉る right? Because no one I know is made of stone. All skin, all meat. That’s what bodies are made of. Delicious skin meat… wait. I think I got off track at some point.
The point that I was making is, “Stay in school.”
That was it. Right?..
*in no way does this post approve of or indicate that I view people as delicious foods that can be eaten.
A couple reasons. First, it’s useful to know at least one reading for a character if you want to quickly reproduce it on a computer or smartphone. Second, WaniKani’s vocabulary has a bias towards words which use readings it forces you to learn with the kanji. By forcing people to learn the kanji readings, they don’t have to provide a mnemonic to remember the pronunciation for those new words, they just say “You already learned this reading with the kanji!”
To be honest, I used to learn reading like how you described, but find it much easier to remember the pronunciation of many words by having kanji readings explicitly laid out. And since WK makes a point to teach those words anyway, it’s great. This is one thing I really like about the system.
It also works the other way around: if you’re speaking/listening in Japanese you’re going to know a lot more words than you can actually read. But if you’re familiar with both the common kanji readings and the meanings, you have a good chance at recognizing those known words when you see them.
Example: Suppose you already know てんき means “weather.” (Maybe you heard it on the radio, or there’s a weather-controlling anime character that always says it). One day you see 天気 and you say “Hmm, 天=heaven and 気=energy/spirit … that’s あまつ いき - which doesn’t make sense. Let me think again. 気 is usually “ki”, like in genki. So maybe it’s actually ten+ki – wait, I know that one! Tenki means weather! I get it now!”
Another example: Suppose you know that ささえる means “to support.” And you know that the kanji 支 means “support” and is pronounced し about 90% of the time. So when you see 支える, you think. “Hm しえる? That doesn’t make sense. But I know 支 means support, and I know that the verb “to support” ends in える, and I know sometimes kanji have these weird less common readings … So I’m probably looking at ささえる here. And that’s a word I can actually spell, which means I can look it up in the dictionary and compare the kanji. And they’re the same!”
(EDIT: Thanks to Ryouki for pointing out my typos! They’re fixed now.)
Okay, I feel dumb. Where did you get that from? I feel like the biggest Japanese noob on the entire planet right now because I don’t get it.
As for the Heisig’s “Learning the Kanji” method. Does it only teach Kanji meanings? Sorry for the “dumb” question, but I never gave it a try before WK 
I was too suspicious about the method.
Based on the first book, yes. There are follow up books for going farther. I think the method is and entirely valid alternative, but I rejected it when I learned of WK. I don’t think the book gives as much structure as you’ll find here. There may be other resources to introduce structure into learning only meanings.
Heisig himself thought that trying to learn anything other than just meanings was too much to do all at once. (I listened to the interview that John Fotheringham did - it was quite fascinating)
…from my horrible typo-fingers, apparently. 
Went back and fixed it - it should be あまつ いき.
Those are the first kun readings that jisho.org lists for 天 and 気. They don’t actually mean anything together.
Oh, thank goodness, I’m not as noob as I thought. Phew! Thanks for explaining!
This exactly.
I’m very much behind in reading, and when I see something like 少年, the meaning doesn’t pop into my head at all. Only when I disect the reading, I know what it means. The longer I study on this site (even though it’s pretty short for now), the more I am convinced that knowing on’yomi is essential for study.
How dare you! I learned how to read 1300 kanji using RTK—just a little unsure of their exact meanings and how to pronounce them😉 this is why I find WK such a good method
That’s one approach, I suppose. I don’t know how good it is. I haven’t tried it and I’m happy with wanikani, so I’m not going to try it. My whole point was that studying individual kanji meanings and readings is not a waste of time.
Yes! The more you work, the more you learn. You should do wanikani, you should do kaniwani, you should read, you should write, you should listen and you should speak.
Sometimes the same applies to words depicted by a single kanji (and read by their kun’yomi), like 生 and 表, and that’s just a couple from the lower levels.
OP, it’s very important to learn at least one reading of a kanji ASAP so you can look it up in digital dictionaries. As for everything else, others have explained better why just the ‘meanings’ are enough.
I find it helps to learn the one (or sometimes two) “main” readings for a kanji before learning the vocab. It shows up in SO many jukugo that it’s convenient to know ahead of time. It really does make learning a lot of new vocab fairly easy, and it really helps to have to learn one less thing when the kanji in a jukugo have meanings which don’'t easily line up with the meaning of the jukugo. Anyway, that’s just my 2 cents.
And then you hear 気がする and you’re like “The fuck is this?”
@konekush Woe be to the person who misunderstands お袋
Thanks for the explanation. Well, it seems that he was wrong then 
Just look at everyone on WK
Im not sure I fully understand what you mean, but you will also learn different word structures like Jukugo and what not. This will help you know when to use on and when to use kun (at least in a major part, there are of course exceptions.) Knowing these word structures and patterns that WaniKani teaches you will help you read words without even having to know the meaning of the word many times.
Im not sure how many times I have answered a correct reading but failed the meaning of a word.
Not that you or anyone else really cares, but to clarify, I’m not in agreement with the OP’s line of thinking regarding what he prefers WK to be ideally. I’ve had conversations with friends who said they can derive the meaning of words using kanji without needing to know their readings. Those people still can’t read a book, or a basic sign for that matter. But to each their own regarding how effectively they want to use their time. It just bothered me to see 空車 as an example because it wasn’t an effective one, which is a great lesson for diversifying one’s learning tools so that one’s breadth of knowledge isn’t stifled.
Who told you that?
Doesn’t seem like he’s likely to come back and defend his assertions, unfortunately.
I disagree, @LucasDesu, that 空車, is a bad example, because he said he could guess meanings with “no shadow of a doubt.” Which basically implies that there can’t be multiple meanings for kanji, or your odds of guessing right would quickly drop away from “no shadow of a doubt.” We know that’s wrong for obvious reasons and 空車 is just one word that demonstrates that his assertion is baseless.
This is what he said. Obviously his argument is off base but he didn’t say 100% certainty as what you’ve misquoted him saying.