I am new here so please forgive my relative ignorance. Are the radicals used in Wanikani based on genuine Kanji etymology? I am asking because I believe it to be less useful to dedicate time and effort learning radicals that are mostly someone’s interpretation intended to create mnemonics.
I understand that radicals in Japanese are inconsistent and, due to a variety of reasons, the etymology is not some sort of gold standard, but building a foundation that is accurate is critically important for genuine mastery. So far, I see Wanikani as attempting to be a cute, whimisical site that maybe lowers the anxiety of learning Japanese, but I also see it as being primarily built by and for weebs - a culture which often propagates language inaccuracies . All of this is fine and this opinion is not intended to be disrespectful, I simply want to find valuable learning resources that facilitate efficient learning without sacrificing accuracy. I want to get a sense if Wanikani will be right for me before I commit.
I can follow the rest of your post but I don’t think you are correct with your assessment here.
It is excellent that you actually use the trial to decide if wanikani is the correct resource for you.
Regarding the radicals, I can confirm that wanikani doesn’t conform to the standard radicals taught in Japan. Some are standard radicals that might have an uncommon “word” associated to them, some are completely made up for easier scaffolding of the Kanji.
I have not met many resources that focus on giving correct radicals. Most people first build a good kanji foundation, and familiarity with the language. Later if they feel like it, they go back and brush up on the real radicals with ank, or similar, if they feel like they need to talk in japanese about kanji.
Tldr: wanikani has no weeb focus, it has its strengths, if “proper” radicals is your focus you might not be happy with the system
If anything, going full “learning Japanese how the Japanese do it is the One True Method” would be the weeby way.
I never understood this obsession with learning ‘authentic’ radicals. Radicals serve one purpose and one purpose alone- to break multiple strokes and complex kanji into simple building blocks. WaniKani does a pretty good job at this, and the fact that they don’t often use ‘authentic’ radicals takes away nothing from that.
I don’t think that is correct. AFAIK radicals were originally mainly used to categorize the kanji. Each kanji has exactly one radical that is assigned to it. Kanji consisting of multiple radicals that show the makeup is a thing wanikani does, but is non standard.
Before digital dictionaries existed, the radicals were therefore often used as a way to jump to the correct section of kanji dictionaries for lookups.
It also helps that often the origin of why the radical was used in a Kanji can give an indication of the “domain” of the Kanji. For example さんずい is a strong indication water is involved in the meaning in some way or another.
I was curious about this too a few weeks ago, and saw someone actually made a list of wanikani radicals with the “traditional” definition counterpart (and what radicals are made up by WK). Here’s the radicals list link
Yes; I think the big point of confusion here is that WK calls its things “radicals”. Heisig called them “components”, which I think is clearer and doesn’t drag in a term with an overlapping but different meaning.
The idea of components in a kanji learning system is that you can break every kanji down into a set of pieces, use the same name consistently for the same piece, and use names that are usually concrete nouns that work well in mnemonic stories. Traditional radicals work badly for this: they don’t cover every piece of a kanji, they can use the same name for several different shapes or different names for the same shape, and they can be awkwardly abstract concepts like “not” or “again”. Kanji etymologies occasionally provide good hooks for remembering the kanji, but more often are confusing tangles of “this piece used to be something relevant but got simplified to something else” and “this is one of the five or six pieces that started out as a pictogram of a person or a hand but which are all now distinct shapes” and “the components here make sense for the original meaning but its use in modern Japanese has drifted so much they don’t help a lot”. Most mnemonic systems use the traditional radical meanings when it’s the obvious sensible thing and depart from them when it improves the system and of course for all the kanji pieces where there is no traditional radical.
In terms of “accuracy”, what matters here IMHO is whether you can accurately remember and perhaps write the kanji, and whether you remember the meaning of the vocabulary (i.e. that the site doesn’t teach misleading meanings for words). Kanji etymology is an interesting side path but it rarely helps with these goals. My recommendation is to treat a mnemonic system as exactly that: decide if that’s how you want to try to learn the kanji or not, and if it is, you want one that is as effective as it can be, rather than one that’s less effective because it’s trying too hard to stick to traditional radical names or etymological origins. (WK is not the only mnemonic based kanji learning system out there, and, especially if you don’t care about writing, you don’t necessarily need a mnemonic system to learn kanji. So there are other options.)
If you want an English language kanji etymology reference that does try to give mnemonics mostly based on the etymologies, you could try Seeley, Henshall and Fan’s The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji. This is the updated version of Henshall’s old “A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters” book (I own that old edition).