Unlike many people, I actually don’t mind Wanikani’s radical names. I find them clever when used in WK’s mnemonics, and anything that helps the Kanji meaning and sound stick in my brain is okay with me.
My problem is when I am studying Kanji with other people’s mnemonics, which is what happens when you use other people’s decks a lot. They make their mnemonics off of the more traditional names for the radicals and components. So I think it would be helpful to know both names for the radicals, the WK names and the traditional names.
Has anyone out there published a side by side comparison list of both?
Dunno if there’s a list already, but I’ve made an (amateurish) start at a new one. Unfortunately, it’s 1am right now, so I’m gonna have to put a pause on this and come back later. I’ll make this post a wiki, so others can edit if they feel like it. It’s a little bit difficult to get an “official” name for several of them - they have some names listed, but they can also be identical to kanji which have different names. (Radicals which aren’t displaying are ones that WaniKani uses images for rather than text. I’ll have to determine whether they even exist as Unicode characters at all…)
All finished. I’m reasonably sure this is accurate. It’s still a wiki, if people want to make changes.
Most of WaniKani’s radicals are kanji in their own right, and aren’t included in the 214 traditional radicals, though not all of them have the same meaning as the name they have in WaniKani. In same cases, several similar looking radicals are merged together - Standard should be separated by /. Curiously, not all of the 214 traditional radicals exist in WaniKani. If they’re kanji or katakana, I’ve marked them as such. Ones that don’t exist in Unicode at all should try to put in image (or ping someone, like @polv, to get from the API) in the character column, and are marked “not a radical” - most of them are combinations of two or more official radicals, but one or two of them are actually half of an official radical.
That’s good, because this is some very good information!
I happened upon it after Iooked up geoduck and thought that doesn’t really look like a leaf sticking up at all, but what the heck.
Thank you! I used this to upload the radical names that I learned outside of WK to the synonym lists. I now have to work on making my own mnemonics for the kanji for which I keep getting the readings wrong, since the WK mnemonics are sometimes too bizarre or detached for me to remember.
I wish they would simply get rid of this nonsense. I find it a complete waste of my time. You’d be surprised by how many synonyms I have attached to this abomination. LOL. Its inclusion has been counterproductive to my kanji learning.
Well, it’s not bad at all! Out of the 478 WK radicals, 348 are either the same as the official radical or a radical based on a kanji; 106 if we only consider the first category. 32 are “not a radical”.
