Did you say what KS is yet? KameSame? I was under the impression that was basically a different version of KaniWani (reverse WaniKani). Is it something else?
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It is easier to make a memorable mnemonic. Same reason for any and all changes.
You’re truly doing the holy work of the Crabigator that your title suggests, I clack my claws in celebration.
If I’d bought a lifetime sub at full price, then by the time winter comes around, my $9/month over the time I’ve been a member would have been the same total amount - which really shows it’s a bargain unless you rush to do it in a year never use it again.
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Call me a pragmatist, I’ve never come across it in isolation (not sure it exists as a kanji) so I’ve never needed to care…
And it’s worth noting as others have said, that there’s no “official” or “standard” list of names for radicals (and WK doesn’t really teach any radicals anyway, it’s just a poor choice of name)
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I did that calculation when I joined and bought lifetime at lvl 2 =P
WaniKani teaches the whole 糸 kanji as the thread radical, so they came up with a different name to not confuse the two.
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That’s the only KS I can think of too. It’s a good app, but it’s a reverse WK system really. It’ll let you study from JLPT lists or WK lists, but all it teaches you is seeing the word in English and writing it in Japanese, so is great for writing on a computer in Japanese, not so much for reading.
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I think you have the wrong idea here. the radicals dont “mean” anything. In the past, the radical 母 was called “drawers” and was used to link drawers to your mother doing the laundry, and a bunch of these radicals were already changed if they had matching whole kanji in the set (another example is 支 being changed from “frog” to “branch”).
I can still remember the original radical names and have never once thought that 支 meant “frog” because the radicals are not presented as anything other than visual pieces used to construct kanji. The names are arbitrary images you an link in your mind to build mnemonics. What they actually are named does not matter in the slightest, only how useful they are in constructing mnemonics to help you remember the kanji they are in. I usually think up my own mnemonics because I find the wanikani ones by default don’t suit or arent memorable enough to be useful, but that’s subjective; usually the inventing of the mnemonic helps me remember better anyway. No one thinks 幺 actually means poop.
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Also another thing to note: most of the “worst offenders” of made up radicals are on the early levels, when not many kanji have been introduced yet. As you progress further, more and more radicals are just kanji that you learned a couple levels ago reintroduced as a radical.
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Classic Poe’s Law. I honestly can’t tell if this is real or trolling. I thought it was real until the “horrendous pricing” comment. It costs less than Netflix, and I use this way, way more than Netflix. Like, half the time I try to watch something, I think there’s nothing good on it and why am I even paying for it.
Every single day I’m reminded of why I’m glad I’m paying for this.
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I want to point out that:
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What WK calls radicals are actually kanji components. Japanese radicals refer to the thing used to look them up in a physical dictionary
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Japanese radical names are often just as arbitrary and divorced from the etymology of the kanji as what WK gives. It is just that the Japanese radical names come from a 18th century Chinese dude so they are rather boring
But at any rate, it’s this kind of post that ensures I’ll still be using this forum long after I finish WK
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hey @anon78213483 - they do the exact same thing with radicals in Kodansha’s “Kanji Learner’s Course”. Which you can buy for like £30-£40 and use Memrise decks for free if you like. Or Anki if you prefer!
I know this has already been said a lot above but you can add your own meanings and mnemonics - honestly I would abandon this conversation and go and figure that out. Nothing wrong with only using WaniKani for it’s programmatic benefits.
Good luck to you 
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One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that regardless of what WK calls them, I haven’t had any issues looking up Kanji by radical on Jisho.org and I’ve only really ever used Wanikani.
And after a year and a half of this, I honestly don’t think I’d ever be looking to study the “real” radicals unless I was going to take the 漢字検定 like @Leebo or if it struck my fancy at some point.
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I pretty much cheat on all the radicals because i dont really care about them 
I dont really have any issues remembering kanji without them. And after the first couple levels it feels like most of them are just named the same as their kanji meaning.
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For a system that use radical only as mnemonic tools, I think Wanikani is actually pretty good at following the “official radical” where it matter. WK teaches 犭=animal, 糸=thread, 艹=flowers, 疒 sick, 忄 soul and it’s quite helpful.
Because this is exactly a case where the “official radical” is not that helpful. The list of kanji using this radical is 後, 幻, 機, 率, 響, 幼, 幾, 磁, 郷, 滋, 幽, 慈, 擁.
In those 13 kanji, only one have something to do with childish / infantile / small.(It’s 幼). Relying too much on official radical can actually mislead you ! Also 幻 is a good example on how messy most kanji etymology are. It look like a very clear cut use of radical 幺, but three different website give three completely different etymology, none of them related to 幺…
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Nono, it’s both of those. It’s “short thread”, because it’s a short version of 糸, which means “thread”.
And yeah, I’ve added “short thread” as a synonym, because “poop” makes me want to take a shower every time I come across it in a mnemonic.
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The easiest way of getting rid of the radicals is to add an easy synonym, lets say ‘R’, to all of them. When you see one, ‘R’ and go ahead.
Yes, but it’s not exactly a reverse WK as many say. It does what WK does - teaches recognition, and on top of that it also teaches reproduction, which is what people mean by “reverse WK”. One could argue it doesn’t teach reading, but I don’t really think that’s entirely true. It doesn’t do it as actively as WK does, but through reproduction and immediately showing you the reading in recognition mode, you can easily learn pronunciation as well. Besides, being able to read something out loud isn’t that useful. You typically only care about pronunciation when speaking (AKA [re]producing), not when reading (AKA recognizing).
Plus, the more you get to know the kanji and the further away you stray from the common exception, the less significant learning reading as a separate task to kanji recognition becomes, as it’s basically the same thing, so long you can read the kanji. Well, that’s my hot take on this topic anyways. Quite frankly, you don’t need to know radicals for anything. They ultimately serve only as a vague hint towards the meaning of a kanji.
Exactly, this is the quite possible the most insulting WK radical.
But like… you feed your WaniKani API token to it and it lets you review items the reverse way, right? Or maybe not.
Well, the OP did ask people to stop talking about other stuff, so don’t worry about it.
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