Is there a way to type the radical reading in kana instead of english if you already know hiragana?
Radicals donât have readings. They are merely chopped up pieces of kanji that WaniKani gives names to so that you can create English mnemonics out of them. They are a tool for memorizing the kanji lessons that follow.
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I suppose you could add in a kana reading as a user synonym, but in the long run that wonât be as effective as learning the radical names that WaniKani teaches you. Youâll notice as you progress through the levels that radicals have their given names because they are used for the mnemonics which will help you learn the kanji.
Radicals donât have standard readings (or even meanings, especially here at WK), so I donât think this will ever be allowed.
I was pretty sure the meaning field wouldnât even accept kana, but I tried anyway. I added ăŻă as a meaning synonym for è©, which I had in my review queue. It just shakes and wonât let you enter the answer.
Interesting that it let you put ăȘă as a synonym, yet blocks kana in the review 
itâs probably for the best though. Otherwise people would get meaning and reading responses mixed up even more
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Yeah, I wasnât sure that it would let me put non-alphanumeric characters in the synonym field, but it doesnât seem to check your text at all. The review field then just rejects all kana before checking against your synonym list. Iâm sure a script could override it, but Iâm not sure thatâs a great idea.
This is probably a bug at input time because Tofugu didnât expect people to do such crazy things. The meanings can have typos in it, if your synonym is very short the error checking would either accept everything or no error at all. It seems that they also remove plural *s among other things, if the input box wouldnât check the input this could seriously mess things up 
Actually, radicals do have readings, but theyâre almost entirely separate from the kanji. At level 1, you have a lot of radicals that are also stand-alone kanji, so I can somewhat see why youâre asking that. However, radicals become much more complex, as, not only are their many radicals that donât have a unique kanji form, WaniKaniâs system combines radicals into bigger ones that sometimes âloseâ their previous meanings.
For example, the âLidâ radical ⌠is ăȘăčă¶ă and becomes ăȘăčă¶ăăăăă if placed at the top of the kanji. Seeing as I donât think you want to have to deal with this system, stick with the English for now. Of course, because WaniKani does âmake upâ some radicals, there are plenty here that I suppose donât have readings.
Youâre referring to ăȘăčă¶ă as a reading for âŒ? Sure, the kangxi radicals have names in Japanese, just like the WK radicals have names here. But they wouldnât be referred to as èȘăżæč in Japanese.
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This question need some clarification, what do you want to enter when you see for example ă䞶ă?
I donât see why they wouldnât be readings. èȘăżæč itself can meaning çșéł contextually, meaning that the readings (which are definitely readings in English) are legitimate. In addition, enough radicals have the same reading as their kanji counterparts I donât see how you can cross it out. Kanji Jiten Online uses èȘăżæč to refer to the names of radicals, so thatâs enough for me.
Regardless, @acm2010 is right on target. If the OP wants to refer to 䞶 as ăŠă, go for it, as synonyms are a thing. More likely though itâs just the kanji equivalents like Big and Person that OP is mentioning. Although, if it blocks uses kana, I guess making synonyms in romaji is the only option for what he wants to do.
I think I was implicitly referring that every radical that have a kanji equivalent like (eg: ć„łăæŹăæšă性ïŒ, there is a lot of those in the first lessons but now realize it is much more complicated than that 
It seems that typing the radical during the review is meant to help you associate them to a âthingâ in order to decompose kanji further down the road.
I think it comes out more naturally for english speaker, for /me personally I guess I should think of it as an emoticon, i.e: Iâm not saying ⌠âreadsâ [lid], Iâm saying ⌠âlooksâ like a [lid]
On that note how do you âtypeâ radical in the forum if they some donât have âreadingâ ? Iâd be fun to have :emoticon: for each radical!
You have to use Alt Combinations or Copy-Paste in order to âtypeâ the radicals that arenât also kanji.
Youâre exactly right with the example of âlid.â Every radical has some âmeaningâ to it, but often times that meaning doesnât translate into the kanji it is inside, so WaniKani prioritizes coming up with visually stimulating components that are easy to remember. Later on, youâll have multiple kanji that have the same bottom parts, but you can remember which one has a lid on its head, which as a helmet on its head, and which has a hat. 
I was suspecting that you were referring to only some radicals. The names of many of them are not taught in WK, so you must have learned them before if you want to use them as answers. And for some reasons the radicals are a touchy subject here because of what WK calls radicals vs. ârealâ radicals.
Knowledge of the classical radicals is not that important nowadays because you can search kanji easily on the Internet, but if you are interested anyway (or just want to see a list) you can read for example here:
https://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals
In the online dictionary Jisho you can click together some âradicalsâ to find kanji: Jisho.org: Japanese Dictionary
(note that these are rather decompositions and not radicals again, yet another different thing called radical!)
For entering them, I usually copy/paste them from the WK pages, but Iâm sure you can also type them somehow.
I feel pretty confident that if you pointed to æ°”and asked for the èȘăżæč youâd get an answer, but that doesnât sound natural at all. Itâs like if you pointed to a square and said, âHow do you read that?â
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I think itâs misleading at the very least. Iâve sat in on kanji lessons for Japanese elementary students and taken the Kanji Kentei, and every time a radical needed to be identified, that identification was referred to as éšéŠć, not èȘăżæč.
Either way, itâs not really relevant, seeing as they certainly donât have what WK calls a èȘăżæč. Not least of which because WK radicals are not kangxi radicals. If someone wants to make a script where they can write Japanese names in the meaning field, they are free to.
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After doing a few more reviews (I had to wait a few hours!) I identified what is annoying me and what originally prompted me to post.
When I saw: ăć
„ăI typed the noon âentryâ âentranceâ âć
„ćŁâ and got all of them wrong, because I should have typed the verb âenterâ instead and that happened for a few other as well (like âbeardâ instead of âbarbâ).
So it seems that sometime I canât remember how to âexpressâ the radical with the english word choosen by WK (like âfinâ) even though I pictured was the radical so relating to.
I donât think thatâs really an issue, as SRS will help me to remember both (the radical and the english word for it) but itâs just a peace of feeback I wanted to drop there.
While this becomes less of an issue to some extent as you encounter radicals that are further divorced from the kanji youâre learning, I donât see any issue with adding user synonyms on radicals for things like âenterâ vs. âentranceâ. If you know the basic concept of the radical, thatâs good enough for the mnemonics.
(Incidentally, my first failed burn was ć „, because I typed âentranceâ instead of âenterâ. So I know this feeling particularly well hereâŠ)
I donât think I am understanding your analogy. Pointing at a square and asking how to write it doesnât make sense in any language in the context of this situation. In Japanese, sure, someone can reply with either âshi-ka-kuâ to indicate the hiragana or explain itâs the kanji of four and corner/angle, but if I donât know how to write that kanji, theyâre going to have to explain using the radical names. If youâre comparing a square to a radical, then thatâs quite off-base in my opinion. Squares have no function linguistically in English. Radicals are closer to letters in English, and every letter has a reading. At least, I hope any English speaker knows how to say the letters of the alphabet (z being the exception, since the US doesnât use zed). Ironically, I doubt most English speakers actually know how to SPELL letter names (except the diehard scrabble players).
As for it being misleading, @Leebo, I guess that depends on how strict you are with interpretations. Iâm pretty sure itâs completely kosher to ask for the èȘăżæč of a name. I donât see why a radicalâs name is any different, though itâs not shocking to me that éšéŠć is more common, since èȘăżæč is much more relevant for kanji, especially with éłèȘăż and èšèȘăż on the playing field. But I agree that WaniKaniâs system makes it very irrelevant to begin with. I simply hadnât known how much experience the OP had, as I first memorized the names of radicals up to 5 strokes before learning any kanji containing more than 5 strokes, and actually set many my radicals to their intended meanings rather than the WaniKani names (in the case of the âfakeâ names).
@proppy The good news for you then is that you can add as many synonyms as you need to allow those slight variations of terms if you want!