That is actually helpful in a roundabout way; I now know that I'm not wasting my time learning every pronunciation.
You are, actually, and the second half of that post shows why. (EDIT to add: I don't want to sound hostile or judgmental here. Just speaking from my own experience and trying to share insight to save you some headache)
As someone growing up learning English (or French, Spanish, German, etc.) we are used to being able to look at a series of characters on a page and have a pretty good guess at how they are pronounced. There might be some room for doubt (moreso in English than the other languages), but especially as an adult who has been reading for a long time, we can be pretty confident.
The meaning, meanwhile, might be unknown to us. Particularly for young readers, there are tons and tons of words that they can sound out, but don't know the meaning of. We are taught in Elementary school to "try to sound it out, and guess the meaning from context."
Japanese is completely different, in both regards.
When learning Japanese you must learn to accept and embrace the fact that you simply will not be able to guess the pronunciation of many words with any confidence the first time you come across them. Even if it's a super common kanji that you know deep in your heart, you might find out after the fact that this is the only word in the entire written language that uses some obscure reading. This is why literally everything intended to be read by anyone under the age of twelve has pronunciation guides slathered all over it in the form of furigana.
The flipside of this is that while you may not be able to pronounce it, the kanji themselves can sometimes (but absolutely not always) give you a fairly good guess at what the word
means, even if you don't know how it
sounds. I often find myself in situations where I don't know how a word is pronounced, but I understand the sentence perfectly clearly in spite of this fact. I usually look up the pronunciation of the words in these cases, but sometimes I'll just go with my best guess (which turns out to be wrong at least a third of the time).
Especially at the outset of your studies it is extremely important to build up your kanji knowledge on top of vocabulary that you already know. Later on it can be extremely beneficial to learn kanji along with sets of words that use that kanji. But it's basically never going to be useful to simply go through the kanji and attach them to a sound or two and a one-word English definition without knowing at least a handful of Japanese words that use it.
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