On every level there’s usually at least one one radical that I name myself. Most often it’s my very first thought of that radical and because of that it also sticks to me way better than the original mnemonic.
I’ve wondered if any of you also do this and if you have any odd or not so odd radical synonyms that you’ve set.
For example, I’ve added “suez” as a synonym for the criminal 非 radical just because I thought it looked more like a canal. Why Suez specifically? Dunno.
Well, I have a somewhat similar thing. For example, I call the Roof radical (宀) “Helmet”, because that’s how it was called when I joined WK in 2016. Back then, the Roof was an entirely different radical 亼, which they removed during the Great Renaming of Radicals (which I think happened somewhere around 2018, but I’m not sure).
Also, apart from the Life radical (生), I also made up Half-Life radical, which looks almost the same, but without the backdrop on the left. Like in kanji 麦 (compare with 星 where it does have the backdrop).
I’ve made up quite a lot of such radicals – Piranha (口, found in kanji like 商 and 船), Chainsaw (斬), Anticreeper (just like Creeper, but upside down, found in kanji like 惑 and 域), etc…
I mostly use the wanikani radical names, because if you rename a radical you also need to think of new mnemonics using that radical name for every kanji that uses it. I did end up renaming 兼 to dalek because it occurs in 嫌 which is a super common word taught relaively late here. By the time it got introduced I had already contructed a mental image of a dalek everytime I saw it and could no longer go back.
I renamed Top Hat Radical to “Layton”
I renamed the “Spirit” ネ radical to Necromancer since that’s the mnemonic Tofugu used to teach the katakana ネ with back when I learned katakana.
I went back to the article and apparently it’s using Neigh these days. Huh.
