Using jpdb to study the Genki 1 deck. Words I can mostly remember on the first try due to going through the Genki book as well, but the individual kanji are significantly harder. Are my struggles normal?

I’m sure a lot of it is because of the wild difference in difficulty between them due to me not following something like wanikani (which I’ve dropped), but I’m not sure it should be taking me upwards of 10 attempts to remember the likes of 留, so I wonder if I’m making things needlessly difficult for myself and how I can change that. Currently I’m going with the default jpdb setting of doing 30 new total cards (so kanji and vocab combined) a day, but whenever the reviews come I’d say there’s somewhere close to a 50% chance of me having forgotten some of the more complicated kanji from previous days. Or should I simply just focus on vocab and disable individual kanji learning? I think that’s more likely to hurt me greatly in the long run, but already I’m remembering a lot of the words I’m seeing more through context rather than through the combined kanji readings. I am using the radicals where possible, but I’m running into the double issue of often forgetting the used components (like the 4 for 留) and, worse, forgetting the components themselves, even something as simple as 田. The mnemonics are not really helping either, with a lot of them being similarly hard to learn and even harder to come up with anything more personally memorable for.

I’m currently thinking of dropping the number of new cards very substantially to just 10 total cards a day, but I’m already falling massively behind with my kanji and vocab learning relative to grammar. Genki is a joy to follow through and suits me perfectly, especially in conjunction with bunpro, so I don’t see myself stopping that any time soon, but the immense difference in difficulty between grammar and kanji is concerning me more and more with each passing moment.