I literally could not learn kanji without the radicals, it’d take me years to do what I can do in months the wanikani method. Everyone’s brain works differently, I’ve tried picking up kanji while immersion reading and I could see the same one 5 minutes after looking it up, and I won’t even remember it. I went through 1000 of a 2000 vocab anki deck with kanji in it, it was a huge huge pain and I never remembered the kanji, only the audio
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It is easier to fill an empty cup. 
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I find radicals making it easier to identify some kanji instead of looking at it as “weird symbol 619”
Granted. I’m just happy that my jumble is still very relevant in Japanese most of the time. Hahaha.
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I just wish they were more clear with what the product was upfront. I remember when I first started long ago, I genuinely believed that there were a bunch of a kanji that all had something to do with nailbats. 
The Japanese names for radicals would often be nonsensical to English speakers in a different way. If you ask a Japanese person what the right side of 教 is, they’ll tell you “nobun” because it looks like hiragana ノ and 文 put together apparently (that is if they remember the name at all.)
It works for them. I wouldn’t expect it to work for new people here.
I guess my point is that there’s nothing sacred about how Japanese people talk about kanji elements. Sometimes it’s just as “made up” as the WK radicals.
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Maybe this will help. I think of right as the one with a thumb at the top, as if you held you hand like this 
石右
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Honestly I dislike it for somewhat opposite reasons. Radicals are pretty clearly defined in general. However, when WK combines them like that and then repackages it as a single radical, it’s just wrong. Like that’s not a radical. it’s two radicals in a trench coat pretending to be one. I really wish they would’ve chosen a different word for the whole blue card set.
Also, is it just me, or is there a distinction between “I don’t use the radicals” and “they are useless.”
To me, voting for useless implies they have no use for anyone.
I don’t use nail salons, but that obviously doesn’t make them “useless.”
I do acknowledge that some people do feel they have no use to anyone, but some of the responses suggest people don’t actually feel that way.
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are they though? there are several systems in chinese, japanese has it’s own derivative set, and most dictionaries I’ve seen also abuse the term to mean character component…
on the one hand it’s just a word and it does the job so I don’t really care, on the other, we may well have had less paticles threads if they’d picked a different name (maybe they should change it to paticles!)
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Native speakers have contact with the language pretty much since birth, though. Dive straight in is usually ineffective for other languages you strive to learn later in life unless you have some basis on it given by your mother language. In my case, I’m portuguese, with my knowledge in portuguese I can dive straight in in spanish and probably french and italian to some extent as well but the concept of hiragana, katakana and kanji is something I have no inherent knowledge of so, diving straight in, would make me overwhelmed and trigered for not being able to do anything. I get your point, though.
I was under the impression that they were, but maybe I’m wrong 
I’ll have to research more when I don’t have looming deadlines
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All kanji have some kind of “true history” that represents the actual stages their composition went through over time. This is objectively true, but might be obscured to linguists for various reasons.
The words we use to break down kanji in modern systems can be pretty arbitrary in some cases.
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Chinese speakers (like me) will generally find them useless (especially those who have received a formal education in Chinese), but I can certainly see how they’re helpful for people with no background in kanji. That said, some mnemonics wanikani comes up with seem kinda arbitrary, like calling the right part of 輸 death star (iirc).
I find that the kanji components for memnoics, but the ones later on used for like a single kanji aren’t that useful.
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I was just responding to the fact that some people felt it seemed like a good idea for kanji specifically. I agree that native speakers have unique circumstances that make ‘diving in’ more practical and effective, but it’s not impossible to do it as a non-native speaker – for example, you could try picking up a few random kanji on your own because you’ve seen them in an anime, or refuse to learn radicals and only learn kanji. However, like I said in the rest of my post, even native speakers use radicals and simpler kanji to help them progress. I don’t think anyone learns kanji purely through immersion, native speakers included, especially with modern standardised education systems. I also didn’t claim it was a good idea. It’s just a possibility.
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I find them so useful! They make complicated kanji less complicated. They also make it far easier to distinguish the difference between similar kanji. And also, without radicals, we wouldn’t have mnemonics (and I would be SO lost). I can’t count the number of times where I’ve thought, “I don’t remember this kanji… lists the radicals and suddenly the story behind the meaning is triggered YES I do remember this!!”
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This is actually why I request that people write replies with a bit more depth.
Whether WK teaches you radicals or not, naturally as you learn Kanji you’ll recognize different recurring symbols. “Hey 公 and 台 both have that little triangle thing!” So putting names to these radicals will help you recognize and remember them, as well as being a huge help to remember the mnemonics
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The only official radical is the one assigned to each Kanji for dictionary lookups. For example, for 軽 it’s 車 car..
These are from the 214 traditional radicals, and there is definitely quite a bit of overlap with what both WK and Jisho use as components.
But it’s more of a practical convention than anything official.
And in casual use, the conflation of particle and component is regular enough that it’s a convention at this point as well.
That’s what I meant above with my comment to @Jonapedia that it’s easier to fill an empty cup. A previous education in Kanji can make it difficult to use WK as you have previous associations that don’t fit with the WK model and you won’t really understand the experience of learning Kanji as an adult learner because of that previous knowledge.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s really insightful to hear from people who had a formal education in Kanji or Hanzi, but you also have to keep in mind that the experience is going to differ. 
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