I predicted what you were going to say, but still you didn’t respond to my argument that the “official” radicals are only useful for paper dictionaries and the Kanken, hence not much use. But you haven’t responded to many of my arguments, and this really is going in circles, so it’s probably best we stop.
Because it’s not relevant to anything I was saying? I never said they were useful for more than that.
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First part is false.
Mnemonic is simply a memory tool. Knowing 的 has しろへん is hardly useless.
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so why are you arguing for these radicals that are good for dictionaries when i’m arguing for WK radicals that are good for mnemonics?
My point from the beginning is I see no reason for this person to use WaniKani radicals.
I do think WaniKani radicals are good for mnemonics.
But if you already know some radical system (presumably one that’s similar in at least some sense to Japanese, which isn’t nonsense, but I don’t think I can convince you of that), then this one will look like nonsense and just be busywork.
no, it’s not false. the traditional radicals have the same name for multiple radicals in however many cases.
This is from the Tofugu article:
I’m not saying that these radicals are useless, i’m saying that WK’s radicals are superior for mnemonics (because they are easier to remember and distinguish).
Those ones called man are called ひと, にんべん, and ひとやね in Japanese… the ones called “hand” there are called て and てへん in Japanese. The ones called “water” there are みず and さんずい. For “fire” there’s ひ and れんが…
Where are you getting that they all have the same Japanese names?
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Yeah their name in English…
I understand your confusion now. That said, considering English names of radicals supposedly for a Chinese Dictionary as “official” is beyond what a reasonable person would consider a foolish mistake.
I was getting it from the Tofugu article.
Okay, so they appear to have different names, as you said.
But it’s mostly different variations of person and water, so that’s still bad in my opinion. And if you learn Kanji on WK, you probably don’t know the japanese names, so you may as well learn the WK ones, as for my argument.
But if someone did know さかさしょう (upside-down 小 is the meaning by the way, perfectly not nonsense) for the “triceratops” radical (like at the top of 尚), I wouldn’t say they need to spend time thinking of it as triceratops. They can just use the word they know in their personal mnemonics.
They still won’t get to skip the review for the radical though.
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though again, you’ll have to make your own mnemonics for most kanji readings and some vocabulary meanings and readings if you don’t learn WK’s radicals, because a lot of them reference the radicals.
Learning WK’s radicals takes maybe 2 minutes a day that you learn them and 1 minute for reviews. Again, i’d argue that’s worth it for the mnemonics, even for a chinese native speaker.
Wont it be easier for the Chinese native speaker to use the chinese name for mnemonics instead?
but WK’s mnemonics need WK’s radical names. Again, you’d have to create your own mnemonics, which probably takes more time than learning WK’s.
Oh, and another thought on the Japanese names… About half of the names literally include the position of the radical in the name. にんべん and ひとやね aren’t just “variations on the same name.”
“ben” lets you know it’s a left-hand side radical. “yane” tells you it goes on top of another element.
Again, they can’t be used as your sole mnemonic system, you’d need to supplement them with kanji names as well, but I just don’t get calling them nonsense.
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You’re teaching me some cool stuff here, Leebo. Thanks. I knew there were radicals, I knew they had names, but I didn’t know about the positional aspects.
I never claimed to know everything, but I know enough to have an intelligent conversation, and I think that’s really all that matters. 
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i don’t think they’re good for mnemonics at all, but let’s not argue.
And calling them nonsense was a bit exaggerated, but my point is that they’re as much nonsense as WK’s names are. They’re created by people. They’re not a law of nature. So the only important thing is how useful they are, not how “authentic” or “official” they are.
Actually, there’s one other important consideration. Would Japanese understand?
With the “commonly accepted” radicals, they would.
With Wanikani radicals, they wouldn’t.
And that’s okay, if you know what you’re getting.
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Yeah, Leebo is also teaching me a lot of interesting things, which i appreciate. I’m sorry if i’m very argumentative, i just felt like my core arguments were ignored for a long time.
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Quite frankly, I think there are failures to communicate on many levels. Which is, honestly, why I don’t really like “communities” such as these. They can be valuable. And they can just lead to strife. Still, it’s interesting stuff.
Once you’ve learned Japanese, with WK or without, there’s not much need to talk about radicals anymore, at least to natives
And if you really need to identify a kanji, you can say “the left one in this jukugo word” or something.