*some* Radicals are bs

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No. Disease actually wiped out the majority, just as the same diseases were wiping out people across Europe and Africa… a very unfortunate and unintentional side effect of world travel in a time when epidemiology was not well understood. Also, the native populations were very diverse, with many tribes already battling each other before the colonists started arriving.

When the colonists arrived, there were both good and bad relations between natives and colonists, often depending on the particular tribes’ view of outsiders. In some cases, they formed mutually beneficial trade and peaceful coexistence. In other cases, tribes immediately went to war with colonists simply because they were there (and that was their right to defend their land).

Many of the early U.S. government leaders admired the peaceful societies of some of the tribes. George Washington led many efforts to iron out conflicts and preserve the culture and land of native tribes. But the government at that time was not equipped to control the flood of colonists, many of whom continued to encroach on lands preserved by treaty, and that started a lot of conflict, much of which was very brutal. On both sides. In some cases, entire colonies were wiped out. In other cases, entire tribes were wiped out. Conflict is never pretty, and rarely does one side bear all of the fault.

Anyway, Wikipedia has a surprisingly good article:

While it doesn’t go into much depth about the relations between colonists and natives (well, it does talk a lot about the spaniards, but not as much about the later european colonists, which is the most interesting part to me), it seems to do a good job of sampling the diverse views about population decline.

It’s also interesting to note that native american population is actually about 2% of the population if you count mixed race, and 0.9% if you count only non-mixed. It’s a small percentage, but is still 6.6million (mixed) or 2.9million (non-mixed).

[sorry for derailing the thread, by the way. I hope I’ve at least kept it interesting and peaceful, though]

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Ye you did. I may have come across a bit rude I think. They probably got sick because of all the new diseases the native Americans never came in contact with before. It is what it is. Can’t turn back time ^^

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Wanikani didn’t invent radicals, man, and it’s their job to teach you Japanese writing. This is an issue with the Japanese language ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

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Lol

  1. Don’t tell me Japanese has radicals called “raptor cage” and “tie fighter”. Haven’t seen many tie fighters back when Kanji were popularized.

  2. You didn’t get my point. I don’t want to be forced to learn radicals of which exact kanji I already know. For example you learn the radical “Skin”, but you already know that. Why not count this as already learnt?
    My other point is that you learn radicals, and then kanji which are only made up of exactly that radical.
    Take the (excuse of a) radical “eat”: You first learn the radical, then the Kanji (oh wow, somehow it’s the same!). Some have countered this with saying that “eat” comes up in other Kanji. This however, proves they didn’t get my point either, because, as I said “WHY NOT COUNT KANJI AS BUILDING BLOCKS”.
    This is such a simple issue to fix and I cannot comprehend how people can support the radical system.
    I chose WaniKani to be efficient, as is proclaims, but then there are instances like this. Sure there are people here who do one level in half a year, but I want to be speaking Japanese one day.

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[Citation needed]
After all we are talking about “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”

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We learned the kanji skin, being composed of different radicals like frog. Introducing a new radical, skin, is a new concept and deserves the same spaced repetition. I think that repitition, although tedious, helps to retrain the brain to treat that shape as a new radical, affording more efficiency and efficacy to the mnenomics that use it.

Why doesn’t the japanese languge consider kanji to be the building blocks of kanji and not radicals? Good question? And while we’re at it, I mean, why doesn’t the Japanese language have more phonemes to reduce the complexity that comes with a small amount of minimal pairs? I mean, does that seem like a simple issue to fix too?

Kanji being composed of kanji and radicals would break the logical conceptual model inherent in the design of the application. It would also break from a fundamental convention of the kanji system, wherein kanji are composed of radicals, even if those radicals are themselves kanji.

I can see the logic in some of your statements, but if you can’t even comprehend how people support the radical system, well, maybe you should spend some time thinking about that.

No there is no raptor cage, the radical for that kanji, considering the traditional radicals, is “diagonal sweeping stroke”. Now, I don’t claim to be a literary critic, but I think you make more interesting stories that involve raptor cages, compared to stories that involve the “diagonal sweeping stroke”. WaniKani never claims to be 100% faithful, and therein lies one of its important advantages.

Even though different users have different needs – even incomprehensible ones – I think this discussion can stand independently of however you may choose to criticize the pace of others. That’s a personal choice of theirs.

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The thing that always baffles me is how many people think repetition is bad, especially when learning languages.

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There is no such thing as a standard radical anyway. If you prefer you could use the Kangxi system’s conventional names, but they lend themselves poorly to mnemonics.

That being said, since the raptor cage mnemonic isn’t used in anything more than a kanji I know, I’m glad I won’t have to deal with it anymore. Some are gonna be a swing and a miss I guess.

I think Tombow is right really. I dislike relearning kanji as radicals, but it would introduce some fuzziness and force the mnemonics to be built around the meaning of the kanji (sometimes not ideal). Also, when you learn the radical, you learn it as a component and image and not the meaning and reading.

So some radicals would have to be learned as kanji instead or you would have to abandon the radical mnemonic method instead. If that’s your wish I recommend trying another kanji course as they exist. Or one with mnemonics that gel with you more like RtK.

As for the history discussion, it’d be really chill if when everyone here likes to navel gaze about race relations, they keep in mind the people concerned may be reading the forums… It gets very grating to be expected to politely ignore to minimise further derailing. :frowning:

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About 60% of all Kanji were created like this:

What is the topic?
“Choose a radical that captures the topic of the meaning”
Like 女 in 姉, 口 in 味, and 人in 働.
These radicals are often shortened. (I think it helps to learn “tsunami” as “short water” and “nailbat” as “short hand”)

Now what is the pronunciation?
“Choose a Kanji that has the same/similar pronunciation”
Like シ in 市, ミ in 味, ドウ in 動.

Of course, this is very old and pronunciations have split in some instances.
But don’t tell me that Kanji aren’t built up on Kanji!

You can skip so much learning with this simple “trick”.

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We have the SRS for that.

If repeting more means learning more, shouldn’t we review every Kanji, Radical and Vocab daily?

If you think there are not enough SRS steps, then why not add some instead of artificially bloating levels.

I don’t know if this is scientific, but I would even say that repeating too much can have a negative effect, since you can never test you long term memory.

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With infinite time, yes we should. Unfortunately most of us don’t have infinite time. SRS picks out the ones you’ve shown you need to review most and lets the rest go (i.e., doesn’t waste your time if you know it already. However, “knowing it” is always more or less temporary.) It’s pretty efficient. Now then, if I have more time to spend in a day than my reviews are taking up, sure, I’d want to recycle some more of my next-weaker ones to review more.

That’s one theory, and it’s not crazy. But it’s also not crazy to think you’re not going to forget something you see every. day. for. a. year. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the general concept kind of goes against the idea that overexposure can be harmful.

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I’ve calculated that if you take one second per card, it would take a hair over four hours and forty-five minutes to review every item on WaniKani, provided you have 100% accuracy. And while you’d only get the full whammy when you hit level 60, you’re certainly talking a severe snowball effect. :slightly_smiling_face:

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