Fully agree on everything you said.
discouraging people for whatever reason
I guess, both marketing and sunk costs play a role. People are on the one hand sold on a particular thing, and then they invest time in it. So they get maybe defensive about their own approach or they proselytize for it, even.
I’m especially wary by now of those that try to sell you something, or sometimes wonder at least “So, when are you trying to sell me something?” when these discussions arise.
Like this YouTuber the algorithm pushed on me claims the best method is “Remembering the Kanji” (found that maybe a week ago). It’s a valid method, but is it the best? But it rattled me a bit. Given there’s a lot to learn and Japanese isn’t easy, it’s understandable to worry or wonder if things could be done better.
After two months focusing on Hiragana, I started out with RTK back in the day. I did that for 5-6 months maybe until I “broke.” I knew how to produce 1,000 kanji at that point from keywords, but something wasn’t sitting right. My motivation was going down the drain. When it fully hit me that the author expected me to learn all 2,200 kanji before starting to learn readings (sneak-peeking at Vol. 2), I was done.
WaniKani fixed that for me. I started over and am now 20% in, and now I can read stuff, too. I have vocab. When watching anime, I not only recognize kanji on screen, I also recognized some of the vocab from what the characters say. Also, individual kanji are not the same as vocab, of course. So WK was helpful there, too. But that wasn’t enough - I was starting to get restless again at that point.
But the solution is of course not to ditch one method for another, but to complement. At least I’d say so. So I found Bunpro - adding in grammar, reading comprehension. And as I said, when I found out what the WaniKani integration does, I was overjoyed because I felt the synergy. I felt one complementing the other.
WK helps me order my kanji learning and solidify it with vocab, helping both kun’yomi and on’yomi readings to sink in. Bunpro made me realize how very important the kun’yomi readings can be, after all. This is somewhat lost when so much more on’yomi features in WK reviews.
discouraging people for whatever reason
Ironically I found Bunpro from a post on WK forum where the poster said, he found SRS for grammar was unnecessary. Wouldn’t have known about it otherwise. 