I’ve only made it up to chapter 4 or 5 (adjectives) in Genki 1 previously before I stopped.
I’ve restarted my Japanese studies with WaniKani. Only been doing WaniKani. Currently at level 9.
I’m intending to restart Genki 1 after I complete level 10 in WaniKani.
At this point, WaniKani should have covered all but 1 Kanji for N5.
Should I:
Just use a Genki deck on Anki to learn non-Kanji vocabs that are taught in Genki?
Use Tori SRS to learn vocab.
Use some other resource.
Tori SRS is somewhat similar to WaniKani, but does not have mnemonics.
I really enjoyed WankiKani because it has everything all setup. Mnemonics, etc. I just need to show up.
I also dislike the fact that Tori SRS does not have a browser version.
The drawback of using Tori SRS is that the words probably won’t be in the same order as Genki, which might make it harder to follow along.
I quite liked Torii to learn some basic vocabulary, but if going by Genki order is you goal you might be better off with Anki and a Genki-oriented deck.
jpdb.io has prebuilt decks for Genki volumes 1 and 2, and lets you do appearance-order study of them. I’m not sure how suitable its cards are for beginning learners, but if you want something browser based that doesn’t require deck-creation effort it’s probably worth a look. Jpdb does “how well did you remember that?” self-grading answers, not “you need to type it in and get it right” answers, if that matters to you.
I think for me it would depend rather on whether there’s a good premade Genki deck for Anki or not (ie one with example sentences and audio and a nice card layout), and also on whether you just want the best setup now for learning the Genki vocab or whether you’re looking forward towards having a setup to which you will later be auto-adding vocab mined from reading materials or hoping to have pre-made decks for specific books/anime/etc, or whatever…
This pretty much touches on the vital issue. Good pre-made decks can be a great starting point, but eventually creating your own decks is going to be the most beneficial. Only you know what vocabulary is important to you.
There are only around 160 vocab words in the N5 level without WaniKani vocab.
Working on this first because I intend to work on Genki 1 soon.
Also, it won’t be so much time spent if I decide that I don’t like it.
After finishing the 160 vocab, I will probably change the mode to either the recommended 10k mode (without WaniKani vocab), or WaniKani mode.
Keep in mind “without WaniKani vocab” includes the vocab you’re not gonna see until level 60. I’d personally keep WK vocab in there, worst case you’re gonna encounter a few words twice, but you’re almost certainly going to miss a lot of very common words for quite a long time if you avoid WK vocab in Torii.
For reference, N5 Anki decks I’m seeing are ~700 items, so if by the end of those 160 words you plan to have N5 vocabulary under your belt that assumes you already know around 540 words (and the right words at that). If that’s the case, great, but if your sole source of vocab so far has been WaniKani I highly doubt it.