For the spoken language I whole heartedly agree, but as far as reading is concerned, immersion is super hard. Most resource won't have furigana and even with the one that do, it's "down one ear and out the other", I don't particularly learn to read Kanjis this way. Once you've got a base of say the 500 most used kanji, and you're able to recognise patterns (components, composition) of kanjis then it's a different story.
I'd add that WaniKani does go into compound words, whilst it teaches ~2000 kanji it teaches ~8000 words of vocabulary (which can be either a single kanji, a compound word, etc.). However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご.
As for my own case, I'm self studiying with a grammar book + the minna no nihong + wanikani + a weekly tutor in immersion, playing Animal Crossing every now and then in Japanese and trying to read Komi san, as well as preparing for a 6 week trip, which will be my third trip to Japan. It's hard to imagine doing anything more – my wife already thinks I'm doing too much.
Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...")
> Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...")
All of the stats are calculated by me analyzing texts from my corpus. If you follow the link that I've pasted and click on "Used in" then you can see where exactly this form of the word is used.
Honestly just saw 苹果 a couple days ago so even that spelling can't be called that rare. It really depends on what you're consuming, if you're just reading daily SoL content I doubt you'd ever see it but I do think 林檎 is pretty common.
I have not seen 苹果 before, where did you see it? It looks Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedia calls it "簡体字中国語表記". I don't think most native speakers can read it!
Outside of Chinese (where it is standard), I’ve not seen 苹果 before, but the Japanese input on iOS suggests it after a bit of scrolling. It’s in the dictionary on there as well, where the pronunciation is given as ひょうか or へいか, which is fairly logical.
You can either select specific text and ask to "decorate" (kanjis with furigana).
Or you can click the extension icon (top right in your browser) and it will decorate the entire page. Mouse over kanjis will show furigana. It was a game changer for me.
I'd add that WaniKani does go into compound words, whilst it teaches ~2000 kanji it teaches ~8000 words of vocabulary (which can be either a single kanji, a compound word, etc.). However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご.
As for my own case, I'm self studiying with a grammar book + the minna no nihong + wanikani + a weekly tutor in immersion, playing Animal Crossing every now and then in Japanese and trying to read Komi san, as well as preparing for a 6 week trip, which will be my third trip to Japan. It's hard to imagine doing anything more – my wife already thinks I'm doing too much.