I’m not sure if this has been asked before but has anyone focused only on learning the radicals and kanji through WaniKani? I’ve seen scripts that move radicals & kanji to the top of the deck in learning sessions.
There is no legitimate reason I have for wanting to do this, I’m just more or less curious if anyone ever had/what their experience was.
Edit: Thanks for your replies everyone! I wasn’t planning on skipping the vocabulary. I was just curious as to the implications / if anyone had first hand experience in using Wanki Kani just for kanji. ^^
I did this from around level 15 to 30 (then reset back down to 13). I found it to be helpful if you study some vocabulary related to those kanji outside of WaniKani, but I did find it hard to both memorize and read words (usually い-adjectives and verbs) that used the kanji (i.e. usually the kunyomi reading) but had different readings than the one taught in the kanji (which is usually the onyomi reading).
It was also a little daunting to constantly see a pile of 2000 lesson items…
I agree with both of the above. If there is a specific reason why you know for sure that’s more useful to you, you’re free to try it.
But just as a random example:
If you do that, you learn せい for 正. Then you encounter a common word like 正しい, which most certainly is not read せいしい (it’s ただしい).
You can of course do it, but it would mean a lot of future self-study and looking up of words, since you’d be encountering very common kun’yomi for the first time.
Though I will say, learning the vocab does wonders for memorizing the kanji. It reinforces the meaning in my brain better than almost anything else I could do.
Youre really learning the readings when you do the vocabs cause the readings for the Kanji in WK are usually only the onyomi. The kunyomi being presented with the okurigana (the kana attached) in the vocab.
You can think of WK as
Use the “Radicals” to better grasp the Kanji
Use the Kanji to better guess unfamiliar compounds
Use the Vocabulary to learn readings
If you want to learn the Kanji WK at a certain pace, read this guide:
Then space out the vocabulary to fit your timeline. Knowing only the Kanji can be useful if for example you mainly want to be able to understand signs or what not for travel.
I tried for a couple levels but what happens is that once you’re done (hit guru) with that radical/kanji, it will go to the review pile and take a while to reappear again.
So this sort of messes with the memorization aspect of wani kani. While it feels that it’s easier to remember less stuff, it might be harder since you’ll be seeing it less frequently.
You also will usually only get one/two readings for the kanji, and there is vocabulary that will use other readings. So you’ll miss out on that too.
I’m sure some people have done what you suggested as i’ve seen someone with over 1000 lessons on the queue.