Duplicate Radicals After Kanji?

I have been taking around 8 days per level mainly due to radicals stalling the unlock of the second half of my kanji. This isn’t too big of a deal though because unlocking them all at once would feel pretty bad. Each level would be half as long making me get overwhelmed when I eventually have like 500 apprentice things.

Getting on topic… I was trying to estimate how long it’ll take me to get to 60 and was looking ahead at later lessons to see if radicals go away eventually. I found multiple cases of “Radicals” that are Kanji from 30 lessons earlier with the same meaning. For example “south” and “bright” are lvl 6 kanji and lvl 36 radicals. This feels pointless and redundant rather than useful… Am I missing something?

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The system is structured such that kanji are always composed of radicals. They can’t be composed of radicals and other kanji. So if a whole kanji is used as a radical, it has to get taught as one as well.

Not trying to change how you feel about it, but that’s the system.

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Ok thanks for the explanation. I understand, but it still feels really odd to learn a radical 30 lessons after the kanji for it. It would make more sense to have them both be in level 6 in my opinion.

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Radicals always come first in a level, so it wouldn’t make too much sense to teach them together. The kanji needs to first be taught with the smaller radicals it’s composed of, and those radicals probably appear in the same level. You could teach the radical version of the kanji in the next level, I guess… But then you’d be spending time in level 7 leveling up a radical that wouldn’t be used for another 30 levels.

The other reason that the radical is taught later is that wanikani is set up loosely to teach you from basic up to complex looking kanji. Some of the kanji that you later learn as radicals are more complex when compared to other radicals. Now add on top of that all the other radicals used with it to make a kanji and the kanji as a whole is more complex so it is taught later.

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