Lifeguard radical

I just can’t get this right.

It’s a bug right now, check the overhaul thread. They are working on it.

That is… really strange… In the interim, doe sit let you type lifeguard as a user-added synonym? Because if it does, that might let you progress, and you are still using the same radical name for future kanji.

It should work now. Let us know!

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Sorry for the delayed response, decided to stop my reviews while y’all worked out the bugs, came back today and everything work as it should, thanks!

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Since there’s already a thread for this radical, I thought I’d ask other people’s opinion before sending a letter to hello@wanikani.com.
Does the mnemonic for the Lifeguard radical make sense to anyone?

You have a task to save two kinds of lives. Who saves two kinds of lives? A lifeguard. They save the lives of people drowning, and then the lives of the people who go to try to help them. Picture a lifeguard saving the lives of two people at once. What a hero!

I can’t for the life of me figure out what that story has to do with the graphic representation of:
image

Can anyone else find a correlation between the mnemonic and the image? Is there supposed to be a pool or a beach or two groups of people being helped? Is the lifeguard also supposed to be in the picture?

I understood before when it was supposed to be two acrobats balancing on an elephant to represent “circus”, but now I’m at a loss. I’m probably just being dense and it’s completely obvious. Could someone explain it?

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At the top, there’s two 生 without the slides. So, two lives. The bottom is sort of like 用, a task. (though, honestly, it’s more 再 but I can see that being harder to make a radical and mnemonic out of)

Funnily enough, I actually had the opposite problem as you: I never understood how the circus radical was supposed to be circus-y, but I just sort of rolled with it.

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Thanks very much! Now I get it. I’d missed that 用 as a radical had been renamed from elephant to task. The lifeguard story makes much more sense now. And I’m glad you find it easier to understand than the old name, though at level 60 (congrats!), that’s probably not so important anymore.

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