It would make more sense to teach 敬 (lvl 33) before 警 (lvl 17) since it uses it as a radical

Ignore the radicals and use something like the keisei (phono semantic composition) script instead.

I went through exactly the same frustration and it helped a lot. I think WaniKani’s radicals are useful early on when you start but become a hindrance as you start building a decent kanji inventory.

For one thing they obscure many useful phonetic components, like in your example.

I actually complained about this very kanji (among others) almost a year ago: It feels like WK somewhat loses its way partway through

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