I know it’s a matter of principle, but I feel like learning radicals that are the same as their Kanji separately from their Kanji is a waste of reviews. If I’m learning the same thing, I might as well focus on the one that’s more useful (the Kanji).
But my main focus here is their lack of connection with their Kanji. For example, let’s say I’m learning the Kanji 態 (level 22). Its radical combination is 能 + 心. But I forgot my mnemonic for 能, so I click it. But this brings me to the radical, and all that page says is “This radical is the same as the kanji. It means ability”. So it’s not helping me in any way. And there’s no link anywhere on the page to get me to that Kanji to get the actual useful information.
I think the best fix is to just remove all these radicals that say “same as the Kanji”. It’s an indicator that they’re not needed. But if that can’t be done, a link to that Kanji would be helpful
I think the idea is that these “WK radicals” that are made up of other “WK radicals” are to simplify mnemonics for kanji that contain them. So instead of 5 radicals in the as-yet-unlearned kanji, there would be only 2.
For me, these radicals that are the same as their kanji are easier to remember than very basic WK radical that have no relation to “real radicals”. I recently reached the point where the very basic ones started to come back to get burned. (Yay! My first burns!) But I flubbed a couple of them that actually have no relation to Japanese meanings. For example 一 means “one” to me and never “ground”. So I’ve started giving all the meaningless (to me) WK radicals the user synonym “radical” so I don’t mess them up again. But I’m not making this adjustment to the WK radicals that are the same as their kanji, because I actually need to know their meanings.
(Knowing meanings of real or official radicals is sometimes helpful because you can guess something about an unknown kanji, for example the water radical (WK’s “tsunami”), which you find in 波、池、泳、港、油 etc., always has something to do with a liquid. Japanese has a lot of verbs that sound exactly the same, but mean totally different things, for example 話す and 放す, where the little 言 in 話 is a dead giveaway.)
My problem is with radicals that are exactly the same as a kanji. And it seems like often you learn the kanji before that radical. So in those cases, I simply need to do 2x the reviews for the exact same thing with no clear reason. As a concrete example, in level 14 I learned that 能 is a kanji that means ability. It’s useless to me to do 8 additional reviews of the same symbol (能) with the same meaning in level 22, just because they call it a radical now. I’d rather they just say that 態 comprises the Kanji 能 plus the Kanji or radical 心.
I think it’s just the WaniKani philosophy that a kanji must comprise particles and not other kanji, but I personally don’t see the value (and I see the cost).
I think it’s a format thing, where they base everything off of the radicals so if they were to just teach the kanji it’d be weird to connect it later with another kanji that uses that radical. (e.g “this kanji is composed of kanji x and radicals y and z” and etc)
What I find annoying is having to repeatedly review things I get wrong, especially when I know I don’t need them. Easy reviews of things I already know don’t bother me. It‘s having to puzzle the difference between cape and cliff or private and prison that is tiresome.
One would think that knowing the differences clearly could be very important. What if you thought you told the travel agent to book you a private room at the cape but when you arrived found yourself in a prison on the cliff
I was referring to the early days WK radicals called “cape” and “cliff” as well as “private” and “prison”. Those pairs are easy to confuse because they look similar, and since they are “just” WK radicals they serve no further purpose than a WK mnemonic. When they come up for a burn review, it’s disappointing to have them be demoted since you already learned the kanjis they went into and thus don’t need them anymore. (At level 50, you’ve probably forgotten all about that because you somehow managed to burn them long ago.)
But it’s a minor annoyance and can be solved with user synonyms.
You may find that later on in your studies that could change. Depending on your ultimate goal(s). Being familiar with radicals and being able to see them/pick them out in a kanji is very useful if you ever need (or want) to use a kanji dictionary to lookup a kanji you do not know. The most common organizational structure of kanji dictionaries is by radicals and remaining components stroke count. Of course, these days ever needing an actual dictionary can be avoided if one relies only on electronic/computer based options that provide for directly drawing what you want to look-up.
What I won‘t need anymore are the special WK radicals, only those that aren’t real radicals used in dictionaries. I actually have a kanji dictionary, good old Nelson. Back in the 1980‘s when I first tried to learn Japanese, a kanji dictionary was the only way to look up words. Counting strokes was very tedious.
I‘m only cheating with the special WK radicals that aren’t in my kanji dictionary. Where WK uses a different name for a real radical (e.g. tsunami for water), I‘m adding the real name as a synonym.
