Hi. The kanji for “attain” (https://www.wanikani.com/kanji/達) is listed as having the radical “happiness.” However it looks like it has an extra bar than that radical does. Are they basically the same such that native Japanese speakers don’t notice, or does WaniKani need another radical to account for this, or what?
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That makes sense, thanks. I’ll update my notebook. I like to write them out by hand to get some memorization muscles going and that extra/missing stroke was bothering me.
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The “radicals” WK uses are only sometimes the same as “radicals” in the traditional sense that a Japanese speaker might recognize. A better word might be “component”. Also, because WK is mostly interested in teaching you to recognize the kanji and not to write them, sometimes they use a single “radical” name for two things that are really differently written and just look mostly similar. (For another example of that, see the “spirit” radical which merges together both a four stroke component as in 礼 and a five stroke component as in 初. Those are actually two distinct radicals in the traditional Japanese classification, as well as being a distinction that’s vital if you need to write the characters correctly…)
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According to Wiktionary, the phonetic component of 達 comes from 羍 ( ⿱大羊; that is why the Chinese simplified form of 達 is 达).
The ⿱土羊 (or ⿱幸一 if you want) component is never used alone, but always in 達 as a block (eg 韃、噠、薘、躂、燵) ( thanks kankan search website for that).
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