Radicals, Useful or Useless?

I found them absolutely necessary in order to remember mnemonics, not to mention just the basic ability to quickly discern between similar-looking kanji. I don’t really have an issue with the names WaniKani uses for all the radicals, because most of them are unique enough so that they’re easier to remember.

5 Likes

Every once in a while we get someone who trolls the site for a while about how much they hate the “silly” names of the WK radicals and how much more valuable it is to know the “real” names, etc.

We’ve had a few of them over the time I’ve been here.

I mean, it’s fine to think whatever you want about them, but for some reason, it’s a popular thing to troll about.

10 Likes

English spelling is random and weird :slight_smile:

3 Likes

A bit too binary imo. Do I think radicals in general are useful? Yes. Do I think WaniKani could do with a few less? Yes. Especially those that are literally just the same kanji :upside_down_face:

5 Likes

radicles, paticles, smadicles…

5 Likes

I found them very useful up until the point where most radicals end up being previous Kanji. I’d say it was around level 45ish.

Looking over the Jisho radicals of 10 strokes or more there are maybe 8 out of 30 that I don’t recognize or associate with Kanji.

This is also why there are very few radicals per level once you hit 50.

It definitely is but those components stop being small after a while. :wink:

So, I definitely think they’re necessary to start and you will use them for a long time, but eventually you learn enough that they become less useful.

6 Likes

I find the radicals to be pretty useful in order to use a radical table to look up kanji I don’t know.

1 Like

I’ve often found myself stuck with a familiar-looking kanji and for the life of me couldn’t remember either meaning or reading (or god forbid, both). But recognizing the radicals immediately triggers the mnemonics/story and have often saved me from giving up on it.

2 Likes

This is pretty close to what I said upthread, but truly, I wasn’t trolling. There are real concerns with how WK deals with radicals. But yeah, trolls will be trolls.

It’s the product that WK is providing. They’d be a completely different service if they changed it. Different stuff works for different people, but I can never really understand the idea of recommending that they ditch the core system, which works for plenty of people. If it doesn’t work for people, there are lots of other styles of resource out there.

4 Likes

I don’t think that’s what I was doing. There is a big difference between saying “I think this could be better and here’s what I find works for me” and “burn it all to the ground”.

I find WK a valuable tool, even if this aspect of it I find annoying and useless for my process. A little constructive criticism shouldn’t be considered a repudiation of the whole system. WK promotes flexibility, in the availability of the api and scripting, so they implicitly acknowledge that different methods work for different people.

WK can do whatever they want and people can find whatever resources work for them, of course. I’m offering the way I find useful. If that helps others great. If others find that it doesn’t work for them, that’s fine too. But saying I’m a troll because I voiced my opinion seems a bit harsh.

2 Likes

I didn’t say you were a troll. People do troll about it, though. If anyone does think the system is useless though, that would be a pretty extreme opinion (which as I said, we do occasionally see).

My position is if you no longer broke down the kanji by radicals, it’d be a different service. To me it’s like saying that McDonald’s hamburgers would be better if they were hot dogs. Yes, people who like hot dogs would go there more if that was the case, but it’s not what McDonald’s product is.

2 Likes

I did notice xD

1 Like

I think Leebo is correct (as he usually is). I don’t think the question is “are radicals useful or useless?” rather, “are radicals useful for effectively implementing the WK method?” The answer is absolutely yes. The radicals directly influence the mnemonics, which in turn directly influences how WaniKani wants you to learn the Kanji and corresponding vocabulary. I guess you could try not to use the radicals and simply memorize the kanji and the reading, but then you wouldn’t be using WaniKani the way it was intended, which was to teach you 2000 kanji and 6000 vocabulary words as fast as possible. I am sure rote memorization works for some, but I absolutely love the WK method.

The radical names and mnemonics are in some cases “non-sequiturs” but their zany nature is the point. They are meant to amuse you and provide a direct connection to the material. I end up forgetting most of them anyway, and just the meaning and readings remain. Also, WK let’s you provide your own mnemonics too, so if something isn’t clicking, you can find a better way.

5 Likes

Diving straight in is possible and is what native speakers do. However, that doesn’t make radical knowledge useless. For that matter, there’s a reason native speakers are usually taught simpler kanji first, and I can say that growing up as a Chinese speaker, I was taught radicals as part of my Chinese education. Breaking kanji down and categorising them helps (sometimes) with working out what a given kanji means, and it definitely reduces the number of distinct things one needs to learn.

I’m one of those etymology nerds, so I prefer knowing the ‘real’ names of radicals, especially since I use my knowledge of radical meanings to work out kanji meanings. That’s what I’ve always done. You might say that seeing a particular radical helps me to figure out what ‘semantic field’ I’m dealing with. However, if people find that funny radical names are more enjoyable and help them remember better, power to them. After all, not all my intuitive methods for remembering a new kanji I’ve just learnt have an etymological basis. If you ask me why I remember that 扭 is niǔ in Mandarin, I’ll tell you the N sound is somewhere in the 𠃍 on the right. I don’t know why, and there’s no historical basis to my statement. Also, perhaps a caveat: I don’t bother learning the names of all the radicals in the dictionary. I only pick up those that have a clear meaning. Also, all the radical names I know are in the target language i.e. in Chinese, in my case. I can translate some of them, but I think it’s best to know how native speakers themselves describe kanji ASAP. In my opinion, one’s objective should be to transition to thinking in the target language as soon as possible, and learning radicals this way can help with that, even if it’s not at all necessary.

3 Likes

I answered with useless but I’m just referring to WaniKani radicals. I do think it makes a lot of sense to be aware of how kanji are constructed (especially considering 形声文字) but honestly, I don’t care at all whether I’ll remember that WaniKani calls 卬 cat pirate for example

Edit: Actually, now that I’m thinking about it again useless does sound pretty harsh. I do think it makes sense to have them and teach kanji by breaking them down into smaller components
but I’m still cheating on them since I don’t see a point in keeping them in my SRS forever

2 Likes

So it’s really weird. I agree with all you said here. You seem to be arguing against things I didn’t say and didn’t mean to imply. It’s sometimes hard to make positions clear when trolls have muddied the waters so many times with disingenuous arguments.

Anyway, in a last attempt to clarify, I didn’t mean to say breaking down by radical was bad. In fact, I think breaking kanji down into components is fairly essential to learning kanji. Kanji are too complicated to not reduce to some kind of patterns. Rather, I believe the way WK does it isn’t as useful as it could be. I think it’s sloppy, and I find it a distraction in my learning. I tried to explain how I thought it could be done better. I believe it could be done so it has utility beyond WK without inhibiting the uses within WK that others find useful. I certainly didn’t reject it out of hand or claim that WK was useless because of this one flaw.

And I acknowledged the trolling problem, but you cut that out in your response, which made it seem like you were accusing me of being one with those that do try to say WK is useless because it’s not perfect.

Oh well. I hope this clarified a bit what I was trying to say. I’m sorry about the misunderstanding. I find your advice on these boards extremely useful, so you (intentionally or otherwise) seeming to come down on me left me a bit taken aback. Any offense I might have given to you was purely unintentional on my part, at least.

And if you still think my ideas would somehow change the base nature of WK, we’ll just have to disagree. To borrow your analogy and bend it beyond its breaking point, I think WK could be turned from McD’s into Five Guys. :wink:

My original post was a reply to someone who was shocked that anyone would think the radicals are useless. That was as far as I read in the thread when I posted to that person. I had specific people in mind when I said that, and you weren’t one of them, from this thread or otherwise. It wasn’t my intention to attack you.

2 Likes

It’s easy to assume they’re pretty much meaningless when you’re just getting started learning Kanji, since they all seem to look pretty distinct from each other and you can distinguish between them without memorizing every individual component. That will no longer be the case as you start learning more and more. There are a lot of kanji that are completely identical, aside from the difference of one radical. If you don’t think of the radicals as individual parts and only memorize based on what kanji kind of look like, you’re gonna run into a lot of problems down the road. They also serve as good mnemonics. (Also it helps with pacing on WK, but that’s more to do with the structure of the program.)

2 Likes

I like radicals, but the thing I find annoying is when the radical has a different meaning than the kanji. This really messes up my memorization. An early example is

支 Radical → branch
支 Kanji → support

I would just force all radicals to have the same meanings of their equivalent kanji (when there’s one).

I know many people are going to say that radicals are chosen to make it easy to build stories with them, but honestly 90% of the stories don’t make any sense, so might just build one with the kanji meaning.

6 Likes