Agreed. They are kind of silly and don’t matter later on. But in the beginning, they are an integral part of WK’s formula.
I see people saying they skip both radicals and mnemonics (just make their own or just drill a bunch), but that’s the whole advantage that WK has over stuff like anki or memrise…Are they really just paying for that arbitrary “level up” feel or the interface (which can be replicated in anki)?
Just doesn’t seem that useful to remember all the silly names of radicals. They are there to help you remember the kanji, but if you can just straight up remember the kanji I don’t see an issue.
If WK taught the actual radical names then I might be more interested in learning them, but as they’re taught here, they seem useless
I feel like radicals are good to learn at first, to help learn the kanji. But once you get the kanji down, yeah they become fairly useless.
Kind of like when learning kana I learned that む looks kind of like a cow head, for example. Helped remember む = mu. But, now that association with a cow is useless. But, it did help me remember it faster, so is that association truly useless? Radicals fall into a similar boat in my opinion.
Not all radicals even really have “real names.” And the ones that do don’t necessarily help. Also, kanji get a lot more complicated later on, so it gets more and more difficult to “just remember the kanji.”
Absolutely. It’s often the most common and will help you with vocab you see both inside and outside of WK
But you still will learn it as part of words which use this reading, and I discover that that’s quite a lot, at least on the levels so far.
but vocab lessons are often really easy since I guru’d the kanji without override and can use the individual kanji, which I know well, to help remember vocab meaning.
I found that I remember readings better when I see them in jukugo words (and the default reading of WK is mostly onyomi as I noticed).
Especially if it’s something meaningful - for example everyone knows that China is the Middle Kingdom, so when I saw that word (before WK) and then saw words “middle” and “state”, it really connected (well, and also due to Sakoku and Sengoku for state). The same for Kyoto, Korea, Tokyo, and so on - as soon as I saw the words themselves, the kanji became much easier to recall.
I’d only want to know the “real” radical names in case they are referenced in jp original works.
But guess we will see how far no radicals can take me~
Well, this is my experience but it will be used in other vocabulary. I’m at level 6 and I noticed it happening pretty often. The point of learning the onyomi is so that when you see two kanji put together you can guess the reading. When I have lessons if I can guess the reading and the meaning correctly I can blast through 5-10 vocab items really easily. And if I fail those words it’s usually the meaning, because some words meanings are sometimes the opposite of what I think.
The thing is with the option of skipping is that it makes easier for you to get through your reviews, which is not a bad thing. The bad thing is when you think you know the item you’re reviewing, but you actually don’t know it. When I’m learning in Anki (even with chemistry) I always choose a lower level ranking for that card, because I really want to remember it and because chemistry exam is coming up in about a week and I don’t want to forget things. If you’re discipline with yourself it can really pay off in the long run.
I’ve found that when people bitch about WaniKani not using radical’s “real names”, what they actual mean to say is that WaniKani uses a different name that some other previously used method taught them.
They’re only useful short term. But, a lot of them will be used over and over again in lots of kanji. The radicals are there to help form and hint at the mnemonics. If you have a kanji like 監, it’s much easier initially to look at it and go servant, gun, ground, and plate… how did that mnemonic go?
The way I look at is is the point of learning the radicals and the kanji on their own is entirely efficiency. Using the radicals, you can learn the new kanji more quickly and have a higher accuracy during reviews. And learning the kanji’s meaning and it’s most used reading(s) will make learning the vocabulary easier. It’s all shaves off time, which is precious when you’re learning thousands of very complicated characters.
Also, since you’re low level on the site you’re probably looking at radicals like “ground” and kanji like 一 and thinking it’s pointless. But, the ground radical is used in so very many kanji and even other radicals.
Personally I disagree with your tactic. Allowing yourself to skip certain aspects may give you the incentive to skip out more aspects of learning (“Well, I’ve already skipped that since I don’t need it, I may as well skip out this, since it would really just be a waste of time”).
I can understand you wanting to skip the radicals however; although I think radicals are important, I feel being familiar with them is all you really need (someone can correct me if they feel like they’re more necessary). Kanji however I think are much more important. You can’t really learn a kanji just from compound words. For one, you aren’t getting the meaning of the kanji. Although you may think it’s easy to remember the meaning, it’s still incredibly easy to get it mixed up with another kanji which means almost the same thing. Also, you aren’t getting the other readings of the kanji.
All it comes down to is what you want to use your Japanese for, and what you expect to get out of it. If you’re fine not using every aspect of a service you’re paying for since you don’t need a strong understanding of the language, then that’s fine.
All it comes down to is what you want to use your Japanese for, and what you expect to get out of it. If you’re fine not using every aspect of a service you’re paying for since you don’t need a strong understanding of the language, then that’s fine.
I don’t place WK in the centre of Japanese learning, it is just a convenient supplement.
You can’t base learning of a language on a single thing - you need practice in reading, listening, writing and speaking (even if you don’t need to write or speak, they help), enough grammar to put it onto, various things from various sources to be able to use it adequately and gradually accumulate knowledge and fluency.
Of course not, you definately need to use multiple resources in all aspects of Japanese if you want any chance of becoming proficient. But if WaniKani is the main resource you’re using for kanji or vocab, then skipping over bits could potentially harm that aspect of your learning. If it’s information you already know, then that’s fine, but in my opinion at least, it’s better to overdo than underdo. Again, it just depends on the position you’re in. I was assuming that WaniKani was your main learning resource for Kanji and Vocab. If it’s not, then I think it’s completely reasonable to skip over stuff.
Let’s look at 大半, a word that isn’t on WaniKani. Let’s also say the word is new to you. If you know both of the Kanji from studying them, you can quickly guess that it’s either pronounced たいはん or だいはん.
If not, you will first have to think of words that contain them, so:
I’m exaggerating, but this might happen to you at some point.
大半 is read たいはん
I don’t think this approach is better, I just don’t think it’s necessarily lazy.
I don’t know what better is.
I just do what works for me and encourage others to do the same.
On the subject of counting words, the other day I was chatting with a native speaker about where the line is between small animals (匹) いっぴき、にひき、さんびき and large animals (頭) いっとう、にとう、さんとう
It was pretty interesting.
Also, WK doesn’t teach 頭 for counting large animals, does it?
I’m definitely a member of team do whatever works best for you. There are people on WK who treat it like it’s some holy catechism that must never be tampered with. It’s a tool and you should bend it and stretch it to fit your needs. Saying that…
Problem here is, if you’re needing the script to mark items as correct, you’re obviously getting them wrong in the first place, right? For some radicals - if they have a different name from their kanji, for example - I’m happy to correct them and just get them out my queue. For kanji, though…while there were some I wished I could skip in the lower levels since I already knew them, I never needed to correct them - because I really did know them so always got them correct.
Also, something that has happened to me a lot is: I get a kanji that’s very distinct to any I’ve seen before and get it right easily. After a couple of months I unlock a similar kanji and suddenly start getting the first one mixed up. The first one gets dropped all the way back to apprentice. That’s annoying, but absolutely necessary in order to be able to distinguish the two. And vocab doesn’t always help. The brain’s funny. The vocab gives you other clues - in a four kanji item you might recognise three of the kanji, your brain will then fill the gap for you on the one you don’t know. Not going to help you when you see that kanji in other words. Even the hiragana sometimes provides that trigger.
tl;dr - You’re free to do what you want, but in the case you’ve described above, it doesn’t seem like a good idea.
I’ve been considering Enlightened my Burned for radicals. If I miss them before Enlightened, I let the SRS do it’s thing. If it’s already Enlightened, I’ll just override it and let it go to Burned. But I do think they are important earlier on.
To be fair, learning the kanji by learning vocabulary doesn’t mean not learning the kanji readings at all. The two pieces just become integrated together. After a while you’d start to see the pattern of how a particular kanji is used and when to use which reading (for the most part of course).
This happens to me sometimes. I have vocabulary in Enlightened using the same reading as the kanji which is in Apprentice/Guru. Just seeing the kanji out of context often makes it harder to remember.
I’ve actually wondered about this myself. Is there debate amongst native speakers regarding which counter should be used for certain types of animals? I’ve seen 匹 for dogs and cats obviously. WK doesn’t teach 頭 but I’ve seen it used in NHK articles talking about pandas.
Yep - I still have 作 somewhere in apprentice / guru.
I don’t think there’s much debate, in that if you point to any particular animal, they will probably immediately say the same thing as other natives. But asking “where’s the line between them” elicited some hard thinking, haha. They didn’t really have a good answer except to give more examples of animals that were in one category or the other.