Can I remove Radicals?

Japanese Language Questions
#8

Well, some Radicals are somewhat useful, especially when they mean different things in Chinese and Japanese. However, Radicals like 小 ( read ‘xiao’ in Chinese ) mean little/small in both Japanese and Chinese and I know that, but I don’t know the Japanese reading. In which case I’d like the reading but not the meaning. I wish it was somewhat customisable, like have a way to delete one side from your revision list. Most infuriating when I put ‘little’ instead of ‘small’ and they mark me wrong. Anyways, thanks for your reply. I guess I’ll have to deal with it. Maybe if I get to later levels they’ll actually help my chinese, though looking at Level 60, the radicals are still pretty basic.

I wonder if knowing Chinese will help or hinder me. I can guess the meaning by looking at the kanji when looking at signs in Japan, and reading kana will help me guess pretty much all the foreign words in English so I found it pretty easy to get around Japan. I like the shinkansen most though, when they repeat it in Chinese, English, Korean and Japanese so even if I miss one I can still listen to the other.

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#9

The “add synonym” function is your friend. You can add “little” as a synonym and it will accept it as a correct answer from then on. Others have mentioned, but WaniKani’s system is based on memorizing kanji using the “radicals” (more like visual building blocks instead of “official” radicals) names by incorporating them into memorable little stories (what is referred here as “mnemonics”). For example you have the “radicals” ノ(slide) and 小(small) making up a story for the kanji 少(few). “On a small slide, you only have room for a few people”.

It’s why you can’t skip radicals, they’re essential to the way WaniKani is supposed to work. There are users who don’t use the mnemonics, and some even add a synonym like “fake” for every radical so they can just pass the reviews while ignoring them completely. That’d be the way to ignore radicals and still progress with the kanji and vocab. Ultimately it’s up to you. I personally find them useful to differentiate between similar kanji, like (譲 嬢 壌), or (微 徴), or (徹 撤). Anyway, you get the point.

If you’re confident you can memorize the kanji without mnemonics, feel free to add a synonym for all radicals that will help you cheat the system.

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#10

You can’t but you you have two options.

  1. Cheat. Open the level list in another browser tab, and copy paste or type in the answer when the radical comes up.

  2. Cheat more efficiently with the override script. When a radical comes up just hit some random keys, it will be marked wrong, then press F and look at the answer, override the radical and when it comes back again then just put in the right answer.

actually @jneapan solution is much better.
Just add the same synonym like “a” to all radicals. just hit a and press enter whenever a radical comes up.

oh and FYI I like the WK radicals I don’t do this lol

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#11

No but I learned the “official names” once in japanese lessons and I thought they were really easy to remember. Every time it is a Wanikani made up name I just get confused. Why can’t there be several radicals with the same name? Why did Wanikani change it every time there would be two with the same name? For me it is way more difficult for me to remember these names I tried for a while but I just don’t get why that was even necessary.

#12

I think there’s an invisible list where it accepts the official radicals (or so I’ve heard). Add in a synonym and you’re golden.

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#13

Like I mentioned before most of WaniKani’s radicals are not official radicals. They’re kanji components used for the means of creating mnemonics. If you can’t make this work for you, even with people’s suggestions… then perhaps WaniKani’s system is not for you.

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#14

Honestly? Not going to be the best suggestion for WK’s own forum, but for you I wouldn’t recommend putting much time into this.

You’re “not complaining” about the kanji, but that’s literally all this is here to teach you. This is only a kanji learning site, not a Japanese learning site.

Since you already, through Chinese, have a basic understanding of kanji, I strongly recommend you find a good grammar resource, and a good vocab resource, especially a good kana vocab resource. Those are the far larger points of difference between the languages than hanzi to kanji.
This should just be a good supplement to help get you fluent.

Good luck.

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#15

It is definitely not a system for me. There are many things that I don’t like or prevent me from learning really efficiently. I’ve stopped reading the mnemonics after level 1 since they are not helping me in any way. But the SRS system here is the only thing that actually manages to keep me learning on a daily basis. So I use it since it is still better than doing nothing.

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#16

So you should do what people have suggested, and add some easy-to-type synonym, so that you can just make them go away when they appear. Because what you’re actually suggesting is for them to overhaul WaniKani’s entire system, and I’m afraid that’s simply not going to happen.

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#17

I don’t think I ever suggested anything. I am using synonyms.

#18

Ah, my bad. I thought you were the OP. :slightly_smiling_face:

#19

I don’t necessarily recommend skipping the radicals, but if you really want to, feel free to install my autofill script: https://greasyfork.org/es/scripts/39370-wanikani-autofill-radicals. It will show the right answer automatically so you just have to press enter.

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Skipping radicals (probably for the 100,000th time already)
#20

This is probably the easiest solution

#21

I just wrote this in another thread, there are no “official” japanese radical names, only nicknames.
while for @FrostWarlock learning many of the first radicals will do almost nothing,
i’m not so sure that knowing 1000 simplified chinese Hanzi will mean that you know all or even most of WK’s radicals for the later levels. And even early radicals like ｲ leader will turn up in complex kanji and their mnemonics.

There are very few radicals per level, so i’d still recommend to learn the “stupid fake radical names” (as someone once put it), because they will enable you to understand the mnemonics.
Without these, you have to make your own mnemonics for every kanji, or learn completely without mnemonics, but then you don’t need WK.

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Skipping radicals (probably for the 100,000th time already)
Who Can I Trust?
What do the radicals mean?
#22

I regularly type in あいれん for 愛人 so yes, crosstalk can be a problem.

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#23

I think official radicals are useful in Japanese. If you don’t know the meaning or reading of a kanji then you can look it up based on a radical that it contains. At least, this is my understanding from what I’ve looked up.

#24

I mean, not sure what you’re doing, but when I look up a kanji I don’t know, I usually do one of two things:

  1. Write it down on google translate and then copy and paste it to jisho or whatever.
  2. Look it up from the radicals on jisho

But I don’t need any sort of study of radicals to do #2… I just need eyes.

It’s really not necessary, and I think WK method of using them for actually learning kanji rather than adding a layer of info to learn for some reason is better.

Now if you also want to learn the radicals, for whatever reason, maybe a more academic approach to the language, sure, go ahead, I’m not saying they are useless overall, but rather that when it comes to learning japanese as foreigners, they don’t do much.

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#25

Wait! You’re saying I can create my own synonyms for radicals? How do I do this? Is it a Userscript?

It’s not like I want to cheat my way through WaniKani, I just don’t know some of the English words (I’m not an English native), so sometimes it’s difficult to understand the stories etc. (therefore I’d like to be able to build up Kanji with my own story)

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#26

Yeah, any item can have synonyms. You’d have to write your own story in the notes section, but I guess it’s doable.

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#27

Wow, cool thank you! I’ll try it out :slight_smile: