Currently I'm just trying to learn kanji readings through each specific word but I'm not entirely sure if its better or not. Is it just a personal preference or is one actually better than the other?
Words come first. Onyomi and Kunyomi are kind of like learning Latin roots of English words. They will give you a clue about meaning and spelling, but alone are not enough to know what a word is or how to spell it.
Keep an eye on *yomi along the way, radicals too, but that should not be your main focus.
It's all about what works best for you. Many suggest kanji is learned best through words, but I personally don't find this method helpful, it's overwhelming even, especially since I still don't know that many words yet. I prefer learning the yomi and meanings of kanji first, and the vocab will come naturally as I keep studying
If you want to study kanji in isolation, then it depends. For some kanji both their onyomi and their kunyomi are used in many words, for some kanji only their onyomi is common and the kunyomi is super rare, or viceversa. This is why, like JackDahlgren said, some people believe it's better to just learn vocabulary directly, since what way you'll be learning at least one reading of each kanji involved, and you'll realize which readings are more or less common based simply on how often you see them.
1. I have a kanji schedule where I learn on'yomi and kun'yomi in isolation.
2. I have a vocab schedule where I learn words and phrases.
Anytime I learn a word and feel like knowing its kanji readings (any/all), I add them to my kanji schedule.
Anytime I'm having trouble remembering a kanji reading I try to "anchor" it to a word I already know (add it to my vocab schedule).
This works great for me because I have a pretty broad vocabulary. I usually don't need to learn the meaning of the word, I just use it as an "anchor" for that specific reading.
This is just what seems to work best for me (N3/N2). It's very reliant on already having a large vocabulary.
This is still a vocab-first approach. I like to prioritise reading fluency, not kanji trivia.
Kun’yomi are just the native Japanese words that explain what a character means. Although these native words have their own etymologies going back to proto-Japonic, they don’t really give much insight into the kanji.
On’yomi are the things most like Latin roots. Many characters can be analyzed as phono-semantic compounds with two parts, the radical and the on’yomi. Be prepared to deal with changes in pronunciation. Things like vanishing consonants, vowel shifts, and truncations are all over the place.
As for how to do it, you can arrange your schedules to suit the things you want to focus on. For example, you could create a schedule with just the kanji→on’yomi vector enabled. I would also recommend you also have a separate schedule for “full” kanji study, whatever that means to you, because you might never finish the on’yomi.
It is possible to study kanji grouped by on’yomi, or phonetic series, (see my lists on the subject), however, this should be considered an advanced topic. There are hundreds of these groupings and many of them rely on obscure characters not normally taught, so don’t try to learn them until you have mastered a substantial fraction of the 常用漢字 and all of the radicals.
Still, the lists can be very instructive to browse, even if you don’t schedule them for learning.
@fathercheese I don't think the "Latin roots" comparison really fits. There isn't a step before learning "real" kanji. Renshuu does let you study kun'yomi and on'yomi separately, but you're still working with the full kanji.
Latin roots give you a clue about meaning - like how dent = tooth (dental, dentist, denture). On'yomi doesn't work like that. Just knowing that カ is an on'yomi doesn't tell you anything useful without the kanji or vocabulary it's part of.
on'yomi are not meaning units by themselves.
I apologise, if I'm misunderstanding the question.
"is learning kanji better through the words or the onyomi/kunyomi readings?"
Learning kanji to word is more meaningful and make it easier to remember the reading or the meaning. But for that method to work, you need to learn a lot of words. It can be also confusing/more difficult when you have words with kanji you don't know or are not currently studying.
Learning the reading takes less time and is more "efficient" but it's also more difficult to remember the kanji that way because reading are a bit meaningless by themselves (most of the time). And your brain don't like meaningless things.
I do both in my case. Tons of words that I learn lightly (I have schedules with only kana -> Kanji and Kanji -> kana) and a kanji schedule to test myself from time to time. When I don't remember a reading while doing that kanji schedule, I just try to learn more words with that reading (some reading are really rare, so I do what I can). I also use the kanji kentei level rather than the JLPT. And for about 200 kanji per level, I study a 1000 words (more or less). But lightly, I just try to remember the reading. If I don't remember the meaning of the words, it doesn't matter. Those words schedules are more like reading practice schedules. Or even Guess the reading schedule.
