Skipping radicals (probably for the 100,000th time already)

[Saimin]

As a native Chinese speaker, you can probably recognize the rough meaning of most Kanji already. But can you read traditional Chinese? You probably know that Japanese Kanji are less simplified than Chinese Hanzi.

The radicals will be part of stories to remember the Kanji and their readings, and are absolutely essential to WK. If you think you can remember the japanese meanings and readings of the Kanji without WK’s mnemonics, you can skip radicals. But i don’t think you can. I also think a lot of the japanese meanings of Kanji are different from the chinese ones, especially compounds.

I wrote in more detail on WK’s radicals in another thread:

@Saimin

I just wrote this in another thread, there are no “official” japanese radical names, only nicknames.
while for @FrostWarlock learning many of the first radicals will do almost nothing,
i’m not so sure that knowing 1000 simplified chinese Hanzi will mean that you know all or even most of WK’s radicals for the later levels. And even early radicals like ｲ leader will turn up in complex kanji and their mnemonics.

There are very few radicals per level, so i’d still recommend to learn the “stupid fake radical names” (as someone once put it), because they will enable you to understand the mnemonics.
Without these, you have to make your own mnemonics for every kanji, or learn completely without mnemonics, but then you don’t need WK.

Noone responds to support emails

spoiler alert: there are no “real”, official radical names, only nicknames.
There is an originally chinese system of 214 radicals where each kanji is identified by only one radical, and it’s crap. It’s ok for dictionaries i guess.
Yes, WK made the radical names up, because the radicals will appear in many many kanji, and you need a name to call them by to remember them. Then a Kanji is presented as a story with the radical names in it. That’s a great way for the brain to learn. For example, the kanji for “write down” has the radicals “self” and “say”. When you need to say something to yourself, you write it down (e.g. in a Journal).
Unfortunately, the stories aren’t always so intuitive, but often the weird stories are easier to remember, and this is pretty much the best system there is.

If you skip radicals, it’s very likely you will not be able to remember kanji effectively.

Noone responds to support emails

The “official” radicals come from the 18th century chinese Kangxi dictionary, and not even all the 214 are in use in Japanese.
There are a few commonly-used nicknames, but no official ones, according to the article below.
Some Japanese language tests especially for natives do ask you to identify this “main radical” of a kanji though, i think.
And you can look up Kanji in most dictionaries using their main radical, but you don’t need names for that.
https://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/

There’s also an article about it from Tofugu, also explaining how some radicals were named.
They don’t put it as directly as above, but they also put “official” in quotation marks.
See the “Identifying the Radical” section.
Learn Kanji with Radicals and Mnemonics: The Definitive Guide