[ehnto]

WaniKani I found filled my head with meanings that didn't correlate to anything, and knowledge that wasn't actually useful.

I am by no means a Japanese expert learner, but I am having much better luck just memorizing real vocab without that intermediate step.

As someone pointed out about the much famed "Remebering the Kanji", you could remeber all the kanji perfectly and still not be able to read Japanese, because Japanese kanji is not equivelant to vocabulary. Actual words, pronunciation and meaning all change when you combine kanji into words.

It's good tangential knowledge to shore up your learning, but it's not something you should spend your entire focus on before you start learning the actual language of Japanese.

[bsder]

Agreed. I pulled the top 1000 Japanese words and then entered those along with the specific kanji readings. Learning wonky kanji readings is for those masochists who want to pass JLPT Level N1.

You want to memorize in usage order as you are, nominally, an adult. You understand complex concepts and have developed motor skills. There is little point in learning in the order that a child would.

[fhars]

The true masochists go for Kanken level 1 (which has almost 90% fail rate even for native test takers, and those are already the self selected sample of people mad enough to try the test).

[brigandish]

If I remember correctly (ha), WaniKani is actually ordered by the simplicity of the kanji, as they also point out that children can only start with simple concepts but non-native adults have the concepts covered but will struggle with complex kanji.

[CobrastanJorji]

You do. Most off the early levels are kanji that a first grader would know, and it very loosely stays organized by grade level, with a lot of allowances.

[kyorochan]

Remembering the Kanji is for learning how to write kanji, which does help with reading as well, but that's not its primary purpose. If you actually do want to be able to write by hand (which I think most people (understandably) don't want to invest the time for), it's well worth the time investment.

> it's not something you should spend your entire focus on before you start learning the actual language of Japanese This is also true. You can do both. In fact I think you /should/ do both, learning new vocabulary using the kanji you've learned so far to help motivate you to learn more. It's quite addicting when you can see your progress day-to-day.