I’m ok with the unconventional radical names for the sake of remembering a kanji. I just came across something that didn’t make a lot of sense to me with the triceratops radical though and wanted some feedback on levels 4-60.
The stroke order for the radical is going to be middle “horn”, left, and then right. Like the kanji 光 which I haven’t learned in WK yet but assume it will use the triceratops radical for its mnemonic.
The first kanji I just learned in WK with the triceratops radical is 半 which doesn’t seem to use the radical at all. It’s the left and right “horn”, a 二 (or something similar) and a | going through both horizontal lines. It’s not the triceratops radical with 干. Visually it does look like that, but I feel like this is counterintuitive and kind of wrong because of the stroke order of 半.
I haven’t finished level 3 yet so still using the free trial. I wanted to know if there are a lot of this kind of mnemonic with the “wrong” radicals because if so it might be a deal breaker for me.
there are a LOT of cheaper options than WK
and options that are free like anki
wk uses it’s own “radicals” and yeah if you want to stick to traditional this isn’t it
wk has no undo button, no leech management and a whole lot of other issues
as a user who migrated away to kitsun to finish my stuff
highly recommend looking elsewhere
it’s your money and spend it wisely, but highly advise looking through the forums before plunking down any money to wk
check out anki, renshuu (free option is good enough), kitsun is paid but like anki but wk style works with any language/platform, if you are looking for just japanese check out marumori (made by same person as kitsun)
really shop around don’t plunk don’t money on wk w/o seriously looking through the forums
and judge for yourself if it’s worth it.
there are a ton of promises made by wk but it’s only been 19 days
do your homework first and at the very least check out renshuu it’s free option has everything you need
It’s one of the most famous aspects of it. A very large portion of the radicals aren’t really radicals. Some of them are plain images instead of something actually in the typeset because they’re that level of not real. And even the real ones have fake names for the sake of remembering them. Narwhal for what’s just katakana ナ still makes me groan to this day.
It can still be a good course just for the sake of things being ordered fairly simply. Even ignoring the ““radicals”” and giving them either their proper name as a kanji, or just giving them a uniform name that lets you skip them quickly. I got to around N2 level in the language in one year doing Wanikani at a relatively fast pace daily and I loathe most of the mnemonics and treatment of “radicals”. Granted, I was doing a lot on the side too, but WK was one of the biggest helps in getting there until I decided to move on.
The positive aspect of the focus on radicals is just to help break down larger kanji into more manageable sequences of patterns over time. Something quite a good number of kanji teaching courses tend to gloss over. But at the same time I feel like WK’s execution does leave a lot to be desired.
I think there’s a difference between “defining and naming components which aren’t in the traditional radical set” (basically every Western style mnemonic system for kanji has to do this) and having cases where one component name in the system is used for more than one set of kanji strokes. My impression is that WK has more of the latter than, say, RTK, because it doesn’t care about writing so it’s happy to smoosh multiple similar looking things into one component if you don’t need to keep them distinct to distinguish two kanji. If you write 半 as triceratops plus dry then you’ve written it wrong. But (like the OP) I don’t know if this kind of situation is comparatively rare or quite common.
I am almost done with WK (as in reaching level 60 soon ).
I had already gone through all the 常用Kanji using RTK (with Anki) learning
only the “primary” meanings and also writing the Kanji with the correct stroke order.
I started WK for more reinforcement (did Anki too fast and forgot half of it) and to learn readings.
After 59 levels the one thing, that I really dislike with WK is the radicals.
Not that they use their own radicals with their own weird meanings.
But that they use radicals in the mnemonics that are not really in the Kanji as its written differently.
Like your example, with 半 and its vertical stroke.
The most annoying one for me, is the “radical/mnemonic” for winter 夂 that is always mixed with the one that RTK calls “taskmaster” 攵.
imo, it doesn’t really matter even if WaniKani creates new radicals, but changing radicals’ meaning may affect remembering Kanji’s meaning (e.g. weaken Kanji’s meaning). Merging almost similar looking radicals would account for some meaning changes too.
And yeah, sometimes WaniKani fails to dissect or analyze a Kanji in a decent way. Sometimes Kanji may have more than one way to be dissected to help remember, but that’s out of the scope of WaniKani app.
).