Can I remove Radicals?

[Saimin]

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.

@Saimin

spoiler alert: there are no “real”, official radical names, only nicknames.
There is an originally chinese system of 214 radicals where each kanji is identified by only one radical, and it’s crap. It’s ok for dictionaries i guess.
Yes, WK made the radical names up, because the radicals will appear in many many kanji, and you need a name to call them by to remember them. Then a Kanji is presented as a story with the radical names in it. That’s a great way for the brain to learn. For example, the kanji for “write down” has the radicals “self” and “say”. When you need to say something to yourself, you write it down (e.g. in a Journal).
Unfortunately, the stories aren’t always so intuitive, but often the weird stories are easier to remember, and this is pretty much the best system there is.

If you skip radicals, it’s very likely you will not be able to remember kanji effectively.

@Saimin

The “official” radicals come from the 18th century chinese Kangxi dictionary, and not even all the 214 are in use in Japanese.
There are a few commonly-used nicknames, but no official ones, according to the article below.
Some Japanese language tests especially for natives do ask you to identify this “main radical” of a kanji though, i think.
And you can look up Kanji in most dictionaries using their main radical, but you don’t need names for that.
https://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/

There’s also an article about it from Tofugu, also explaining how some radicals were named.
They don’t put it as directly as above, but they also put “official” in quotation marks.
See the “Identifying the Radical” section.
Learn Kanji with Radicals and Mnemonics: The Definitive Guide

[quollism]

@FrostWarlock

I wonder if knowing Chinese will help or hinder me.

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

[dogandwolf]

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.

[tzukishiro]

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.

[Ayojo]

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)

[Leebo]

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

[Ayojo]

Wow, cool thank you! I’ll try it out

[Hyva]

A little out of the loop here, but i think you might be looking for this:

[Userscript] WaniKani Lesson User Synonyms v2

Script: WaniKani Lesson User Synonyms 2 Adds User Synonyms to the lesson page. Adds User Synonyms and Notes to unlearned item pages. Quote from the original thread: Because User Synonyms and Notes cannot be read from the WK server until lesson quiz completion anything input with this script is stored in local browser storage. This means of course that it only works if you use a single browser for WK. It is intended for use on items for which you will complete the lesson quiz relatively soon…

[Belthazar]

@Hyva

A little out of the loop here, but i think you might be looking for this:

Just to be clear, by the way, this script simply allows you to add synonyms during lessons - adding them during reviews, or from the item’s own page, is already possible in vanilla WaniKani.