Again, you can still start with smaller portions by learning simple kanji. You seem to be deliberately ignoring that point of my argument at this point.
You can still use mnemonics. I didn’t say they shouldn’t use them, I just said they aren’t good in their current form.
I did say they should skip radicals, but I NEVER said that they should skip learning simple kanji before more complex kanji, and I NEVER said they shouldn’t build more complex kanji out of simple ones.
The first time it appears, in our favorite kanji 口, it says
Whenever we need to remember the sound こう we use the name こういち. You’ll become familiar with this name after a while because the reading こう comes up a lot.
They tell you what they’re doing, and it doesn’t have to say it’s the founder. As far as anyone needs to know, it’s just a character that they’ve created.
And since it does come up dozens of times, it becomes easy to build on that character.
I kind of got the hint when I got a Wanikani email from a person named Kouichi lol.
Also, is it a bad mnemonic if you remembered it so well just by being annoyed with it? ;D
It’s like “no bad publicity” but “no bad mnemonic”. I hate “raptor cage” but I’ll be damned if I ever forget it because of how much I hate it, if that makes sense 
I mean, kind of? I only get mad at the really, really bad ones. Lots are just, “Meh. That’s stupid.” and are immediately forgotten.
There are plenty of shapes within kanji that you can’t build from smaller kanji. In those cases, you’re going to have to invent something like the radical system to deal with it.
Simple. Just looking at that kanji is depressing.
This might be old news to a lot of people, but I only recently figured out that you can also just go to the radicals menu, view specific radicals and add synonyms from there. I think as long as you have learned it in a lesson you can go ahead and add a custom meaning to a radical, no need to do it during a review 
You can use WaniKani for the SRS without using the mnemonics. I often come up with my own that stick better. I’d say I only use about 75% of them. Like for example Migi for “Right” for some reason I always imagine a MiG fighter off to my right.
Why? Why not just build off the simple kanji, and make meanings for the other shapes as they come up?
By your reasoning, there should be an elaborate mnemonic for every hiragana or katakana that is attached to a kanji, but there isn’t. They pretty much just say “This vocab has kana that adds no meaning. Deal with it.”
And in response you might say, “Well, you already know the pronunciation of those kana.” While that might be true, they can change the meaning of kanji in very unexpected ways. Just like the extra “nonsense” radicals change the meaning of kanji they build on.
So, if we should learn nonsense mnemonics for the nonsense radicals, then why don’t we need mnemonics for the nonsense kana changes?
You’re talking about okurigana? Okurigana are critical for differentiating between vocab, I don’t know what you mean by that. If you understand Japanese grammar (and etymology), the okurigana contain plenty of meaning. WK doesn’t teach grammar, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
The answer is… sure… go ahead, make a unique mnemonic system for all 2000+ kanji and all 6000+ vocab, without consistency between the elements. They chose not to. I can see the merit to doing it your way, if you have the time and resources to do it. No one is saying WK is perfect.
I don’t use mnemonics every time I learn a new kanji/word. Sometimes things just stick with what’s already there. Especially the farther you go, you can often guess the pronunciation of a new kanji upon seeing it for the first time. But when the mnemonics are there, then that’s a nice load off my mind having to invent one if I don’t want to.
You are advocating for using different building blocks, but you’re just hand-waving away the hurdles that might arise since you aren’t ever going to actually do it. Not that difficult to say, a bit more difficult to implement at this scale in reality.
Honestly, I almost never use the mnemonics. There are a few I had trouble remembering and would go back to read the mnemonic, but I usually end up skipping over it to be honest. You don’t have to use the mnemonics to use the website. I still find the site to be helpful without studying them. But I tend to read a lot every day as well, so that probably helps.
You sound very reasonable so don’t worry 
The most important thing we learned today is that mnemonics are a very sensitive topic here 
I noticed that mnemonics are necessary for me now that some kanji are so similar. I can’t learn them without the mnemonics ;___;
Just use the mneumonics provided if they work for you
If they don’t, make up your own
If you don’t like mneumonics and can learn without them then that’s great
I mostly use mneumonics outside of WaniKani when I can’t rememeber how to write a certain word like 登録 (registration) or 警察 (police). I have not learned the individual Kanji for these words yet so sometimes I forget what “radicals” are included.
Take 録 in 登録. I sometimes don’t remember the 金 in 録 to I made up something like:
“Hi, I’d like to register an account at your water bank” cause gold is money and bla bla it makes sense to me. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.
Everyone, do you!!
The brain learns best by association. This is how we normally learn the things around us, associating it to the situation and similar memories. Getting a “scribble” on a paper doesn’t give you anything to associate it with, forcing you to just memorize it without any help. You are more likely to forget it the moment you look away. The mnemonics, though just a short line of text, gives you vivid images in your mind with context of association. It doesn’t take time, most of the mnemonics I read past in mere seconds, but WOW does it stick! So it isn’t a time waste, it is a time saver! But it does take some imagination and feeling, the more vividly you see it and stronger you feel it the more it will stick. If next time you see it you have to think through the mnemonic to get to the answer, you are half way there. Soon you will get straight to the answer without even thinking about the mnemonic; you remember the kanji on its own, strong enough to not have to think about it to get there.
So it’s not only that it works, it works fast and efficiently!
I started with Remembering the Kanji years ago, which use the same system. I could do 100 kanji per day! And as long as I kept doing the reviews right they stuck! But then you reached a point where you had to make your own mnemonics, which is where I failed. WaniKani doesn’t do that! It will give you vivid images for almost every item! The few where they fail for you there might be other user made mnemonics that works better, or you can make your own if you want. I like to replace Yankees with Yakuza on mnemonics for や cause I don’t do sports… not even sure what sport they do, lol! I believe they used a bat…? Baseball?.. ^^; Nope! Yakuza!! =D
@Leebo, I think you and @Sextron are talking past eachother.
If I’m not mistaken, Sextron means that learning a kanji a second time as a radical is unnecessary, since the mnemonic could just as easily refer to the kanji mouth.
This would also help when they don’t bother creating a radical of a less frequently used component kanji, such as 倉, and thus having to resort to creating a much more complicated mnemonic using all of its constituent parts instead.
I hope this makes sense.
You were fine, you were a little… helpless… but overall fine. We get a little uppity when people are negative… which Sextron admits that he was being.
There are just week after week of people coming to the forums demanding we explain every little choice the WK team made and it gets a little tiring.
So if you take anything away from this thread, it’s that we love to help IF you are also helping yourself. If you want to nitpick and complain we get less helpful because we’ve had this conversation countless times before and it usually leads nowhere.
Just adding my voice to what so far looks like a pretty sizable majority saying: I can without a doubt, say “Yes. It’s better to start with the radicals, and not the kanji."
I see, I’ll keep this in mind for future posts.
I really didn’t mean my post to be negative in any way, I just tend to get a little carried away when trying to express myself. :X
For now don’t worry or keep anything in mind. Post what you want, you weren’t negative and this isn’t in response to you.
