Is there a way you can learn more radicals before moving onto Hiragana which Wanikani recommends after learning the 1st 25 radicals, prior to moving onto Kanji where I assume after completing the first Kanji lessons more radicals are revealed.
Regards
Simon
I donât exactly know what youâre getting at, so in case the answer is not useful, Iâm sorry. 
If you want to learn more radicals from the start, nothing stops you from going to the overview of the second level and click through the radicals there. I donât really know how that can be useful, but you can absolutely do that!
Apart from that: You should know at least Hiragana from the start, donât try to rely on Romaji too much, it will bite you down the line. Hiragana is absolutely necessary for anything japanese which involves written content. I donât know why WK says you should start with that after the first batch of radicals because honestly, you should know the scripts before even starting WK in my opinion. 
I donât think Wanikani says you should learn the radicals before hiragana. They tell you should at the very least know hiragana already before kanji shows up. Meaning, you should get started on that ASAP before moving on with anything else because itâs the absolutely fundamentals of reading anything in the language. When kanji starts being introduced, itâs going to expect you to be able to understand the readings in hiragana already.
I didnât say Wanikani told you to learn the radicals before Hiragana, my experience of Wanikani so far as a beginner. I dived straight in and using the SRS have memorised the 1st 25 radicals, I then came to the next lessons on level one which were Kanji, following the pop up I read this. Screenshot below.
As someone that follows the rules I have gone to Tofugu and downloaded the Hiragana learning material and am studying that.
The reason for my question is, if the radicals are the building blocks of Kanji, shouldnât I learn all the building blocks first? I know its a bit more complicated than that.
I can go to Level 2 radicals but you cant take them as lessons therefore you are not using the SRS method which works well foe me.
Needing to learn all the radicals first would make sense if every individual kanji used every single radical. But thatâs not the case. So no, you donât need âall the building blocksâ to move on to learning basic kanji after knowing some radicals.
The system Wanikani uses is to help you get familiar with how kanji is broken down into individual parts as youâre learning them. So you can tell them apart better over time as they become increasingly complex. Which also helps later on when you want to look up characters you donât know yet when seeing them in the wild. It eases you into it.
I think you are misunderstanding the writing systems.
Hiragana are characters that represent sounds. There are few hiragana relative to the number of kanji. Similarly, katakana have the same purpose (they represent sounds only), though theyâre used most often for loanwords and transcriptions of foreign words. There are only on the order of 50 hiragana and on the order of 50 katakana, but there are tens of thousands of kanji and WaniKani will teach you on the order of 2,000.
You should definitely learn hiragana first. They are used extensively on WaniKani to give the reading of kanji. The kanji lessons wonât make any sense if you donât know hiragana, because the reading requires knowledge of hiragana. For example, youâll learn the reading of the kanji äž as ăăă, but you wonât be able to read that if you donât study hiragana first.
Edit:
Radicals and hiragana arenât related. You donât need to study any radicals at all to learn hiragana. The radicals are nothing more than a set of shapes that appear commonly in kanji. You need both the radicals (introduced as needed by WaniKani) and knowledge of hiragana to do the kanji lessons.
Thank you and sorry I didnât mean to sound rude.
Learning Hiragana is a bit more involved and is taking me longer to grasp including the correct writing which is definitely helping though.
Im itching to get on with the Kanji lessons but want to complete (not really complete) my learning of Hiragana or at least have a good understanding before moving onto the Kanji, as this would seem the right thing to do.
No worries. Misunderstandings happen on the internet. Especially when entering a field youâre new to. Good luck getting Hiragana down. That on its own goes a long way to understanding how the language functions.
I know they arenât related, Im following the steps on Wanikani, learn the 1st 25 radicals, move onto learning Hiragana before moving onto the Kanji.
The reason for my intitial question was, obviously the radicals are one of the first things you need to know when looking at Kanji, I learn quickly with the SRS method and thought that being able to recall more would be an advantage to my learning. Not that it would help with learning Hiragana,
Since youâre someone who follows the rules, if you havenât, please read the wanikani knowledge guide (this links to Radical Names explanation, but youâll be able to read the entire guide as well).
No. The whole idea behind wanikani is breaking a massive number of items (kanji) into small batches based on the complexity of said items. The level of complexity goes up every level, and it builds upon itself, a radical build a kanji that becomes a more complex radical that builds a more complex kanji. Itâs a gradual progression.
Hiragana and katakana are similar to abcs, kanji in themselves are more close to a pictorial representation of a concept. And radicals are simply an aid.
Thatâs fair. I would recommend spending your time and effort on learning hiragana and katakana until you are comfortable with both reading and typing.
If you really want to learn kanji at this point, you could potentially learn readings with Latin characters, but youâd have to use some other resource that gives the readings without using hiragana. Personally, I would not recommend this.
I think this is the right way to go!
WaniKani will teach you the radicals you need at the beginning of each level. I donât think thereâs an advantage to learning radicals in isolation. Even if you learned every radical, you wouldnât really know Japanese.
An important thing to realize is that the radicals donât necessarily tell you anything about the meaning of characters. Some do, but many donât (characters with the âscooterâ radical, â», donât have anything to do with scooters; itâs just a way to help you memorize the kanji with a mnemonic device).
I apologize if any of my previous posts seemed confrontational. I was confused by your question.
In short, I believe you should spend as much time as you need to learn hiragana (and, in my opinion, also katakana; WaniKani teaches vocabulary like ăăă«, ăȘăłăŽ, and ăąăĄăȘă«äșș, and youâll encounter words with katakana as early as level 2) before moving on to anything else. Just trust the order WaniKani uses to introduce new topics for now; thereâs no need to learn more radicals.
Thank you very much. I expected it to be daunting as a self learner, there is so much out there and I was getting a bit lost. I have a plan now.
Yes and no. WaniKani is going to take care of that for you, by only showing you kanji with the radicals you already know, and slowly introduce more radicals (so then more kanji) as you go along. You donât have to learn all the radicals all at once.
Itâs a good question, donât feel bad for asking.
Good luck! Learning Japanese is not easy. It will take a lot of time, which can (very understandably) be quite frustrating. Since you like the WaniKani SRS, Iâd recommend finding something similar to cover hiragana and katakana. There are tons of options for this, including apps and flashcard decks.
Iâm still a beginner, but Iâve been interested in Japanese for a long time and Iâve started studying and given up multiple times over the years. I think Iâve finally reached a critical point where, though Iâm still a beginner, Iâve found a stable footing and I feel like Iâm just walking with a headwind instead of being blown around by a tornado.
If you already have a plan in mind, you can disregard the rest of my message. If youâre not quite sure where to go next, read on.
I think learning hiragana and katakana, then following up with consistent use of WaniKani and a grammar resource is a tried and true way to learn the fundamentals. You can get pretty far with that combination.
Hiragana, on the other hand, you DO kind of have to learn it up front all at once. Trust it will make everything easier though, to not have to struggle with that all along.
Mmm. I think a useful thing to know here is that hiragana are a small complete system of writing â you âonlyâ have to learn fifty-odd symbols and some rules, and then you can read anything written in them. So itâs feasible to learn them all up front and then you get constant practice in using them as you go along that reinforces that learning. Kanji, on the other hand, are a massive system (WK teaches you thousands of them) and not a fixed âIâve learnt them all, Iâm done nowâ system. When you start youâll be learning kanji that come up very often; by the time you get to WK level 30 or so youâll have enough to be making a start on reading real Japanese books or manga (sometimes looking up or guessing or skipping kanji you donât know yet), at level 50-60 youâll be learning some pretty obscure kanji, and even after youâve finished level 60 there will be kanji out there that WK hasnât taught you, and youâll likely occasionally run into one you donât know for years and decades after that. That means that (a) itâs definitely not possible to learn âall the kanjiâ ahead of time and (b) luckily you donât have to! I second @northpilot 's view that âhiragana first, then kanji and vocab alongside some kind of grammar resourceâ is a pretty solid well tested approach.
I recommend this video. It explains radicals better than Wanikani
Thank you to everyone for all their replies, it has all been very useful and the video was very good 
