I saw two discussions about this, and I have similar reasons why I don’t like learning radicals in this program.
So, I learned simplified Chinese radicals in Chineasy (I was a beginner), and activated 3 learning promo-codes to learn more. I know that Chinese is NOT Japanese, but some characters can be different by meaning. I came to learn components, but there was one confusion:
In WK, some numbers show weirdly: one is “ground”, ten is “cross”, eight is “fins”. I checked the numbers in Japanese, and they show exact kanji as traditional hanzi Chinese had (I know those are radicals), but some people say it will be a lot of harder, when nobody talks about Chineasy (it’s a paid app, but you can learn, and do those promo-codes, I suggest if you have like 3 devices so you don’t need to force your friends)
I was confused how the simplified hanzi for “prediction” became “toe”, which makes no sense.
No offense of learning radicals if you learnt radicals in Chineasy with 3 devices
WaniKani calls them radicals, but they’re more like mnemonic components to help you memorise kanji, which is why a bunch of them have weird names. The names are aids to help you with the kanji that contain them, and nothing more.
As you probably know, Japanese, like Chinese, considers kanji to have a single radical and then a bunch of other strokes - for example, the radical for 鬱 is 鬯, and then you just draw the rest of the owl, as it were. WaniKani, however, breaks down the entire kanji into radical-like components - specifically, 木 twice plus 缶 plus a WaniKani-exclusive component which doesn’t exist in Unicode but is basically the whole bottom half of the character, so perhaps I’ve picked a bad example, but the point is, the resulting mnemonic is intended to help you learn the whole character.
True but there aren’t that many radicals with this issue. I also started with prior Chinese experience and still have found WaniKani to be the best systematic way of learning Japanese readings for kanji.