Yeah… I don’t mind when they point out stuff in spoken contexts being unnatural, it’s the unsolicited comments about stuff that I haven’t asked them about that are annoying.
Or like, there was that user whose wife scoffed at him learning 航空母艦 on WK and then they saw a segment about aircraft carriers on the news that night.
Yeah, exactly what I was trying to get across. Though I was perhaps more gruff about it.
Edit:
航空母艦 is worth learning if only because 母艦 makes me giggle.
友人 is not uncommon at all. it’s “adult language”, that’s how you refer to friends in a formal context. calling a friend 友達 would sound cute and a bit childish in such a situation.
Thanks for the helpful replies – and for not roasting me too much for being new to this! I definitely see now that “machine” is really “machine counter” in the description… I guess I wasn’t paying too much attention. I’m also going to start cross referencing the kanji that I’m learning in WK with a Japanese dictionary so I get a better understanding of the meanings. I’ll also tell my wife to be more patient (she is actually really amazed that I can read so much in just a few weeks) 
I think its best when you see a new kanji to think “this kanji usually means this, in a word”, but not necessarily as a ‘word’ itself, unless you see it in a vocab. I remember when I started I too thought for a hot minute that 台 meant machine in general. Then vocab showed up（五台、一台、etc) and I realized, ‘ohhh wait, ok’. Just need to separate kanji from vocab in your mind, which can be tricky.
Wanikani is just not useful enough…
I remember reading a news article a while back that was expressing that some native people that lived in the north pole or some area had like several different ways to express the word for “snow” while we mainly have one or so. Languages is all about expanding what your perceptions are in my opinion.
Sometimes I like to think of languages and words in a mental line diagram. So mentally I picture a list of words on the left and right of in this case English and Japanese. (but I include Chinese too as it’s my background) Then for a certain concept like 生 on the right and lines going to the left that go to raw and fresh. Then lines from fresh going to the right side for like 新鮮 then a line going to the Chinese side also meaning fresh often for seafood in parentheses. Expanding on this obviously you get a really messy drawing with lines going all over the place.
I have a BA in linguistics and this topic actually kind of irritates linguists to some degree because of its misrepresentation in the media, haha. If you think about it, in English anywhay there are actually a handful of words that are used to describe snow, e.g. snow, powder, fluff, though the latter two are more metaphorical. And there is nothing stopping an English speaker from, you know, just appending an adjective to more accurately describe the type of snow they’re talking about, e.g. wet snow, frozen snow, slippery snow, powdery snow, dirty snow, packed snow, melting snow etc.
Kind of like trying to assert that English has no way to say 今週.
“Japanese has so many words for different kind of week!”
Heh
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