They're really just squiggles

Japanese Language Kanji
1

can we just agree that radicals are made up and only good for dictionary reference?

図書館

picture, writing, eat, bureaucrat

call me stupid but I don’t see how you get library out of that!

I don’t see how eat and bureaucrat equals large hall.

if you go through the finite list of sounds you might eventually end up with toshokan or you might get zushotakan or several other configurations. 館 on its own is yakata. but man good lid double mouth… it just keeps getting worse.

I’m not getting the same warm fuzzy feelings about radicals and components as everyone else. even the simple stuff seems highly contrived.

2

mnemonics are just a way of getting these squiggles into your long term memory

eventually, with enough exposure to the words, you stop thinking in terms of mnemonics and even individual kanji and just know that word as としょかん and know it’s the big building they keep all the books you can read for free

3

Kanji are also phono-semantic compounds. That is, there’s often a radical that hints at the meaning and another one that tells you (sometimes) what the on’yomi is. So for example 館 is composed of the “eat” radical, which doesn’t have much connection to buildings in general but could signify that it’s a place you can eat, and what WK calls the “bureaucrat” radical often means that a kanji is read かん when it’s present. This is a long way to say that the radicals within a kanji aren’t always super helpful in telling you what it means, so don’t overthink it. The silly names for radicals are a WK invention.

4

i go to kakimashou and choose a radical and see words with that radical. choose 亻and see how the usage of 亻in no way influenced the pronunciation of those words.

人 person (hito) 何 what (nani) 今 now (ima) 俺 I (ore) 会 meeting (au) 僕 me (boku) 体 body (karada) 作 make (tsukuru) 使 use (shi) 信 faith (shin) 以 by means of 代 substitute 仕 attend 他 other 付 adhere (tsuke) 任 responsibility (nin)…

i see no decent correlation between the words. the beginning sounds are all over the board. so we’re hoping to make up a little story to remember them by? a person has a “responsibility” to the king… the body is like a person’s book or record of all the scars and tattoos gathered over a lifetime? (that’s actually a pretty good one for a mnemonic). i get the method. it’s how knowledge was passed down for the first quarter million years before the arbitrary squiggles became popular. i was honestly hoping to crack some secret kanji code known only to the shinobi (or ninja, depending on how you want to read it: drop a sword on another’s heart, man 忍者 ) and be reading and speaking Japanese overnight. it’s obvious though that kanji is nowhere near as logical and regular as Japanese verbs or grammar. this is where Japanese gets messy.

i was hoping for a little bit more than c-a-t means a “c”ute-”a”dorable-”t”abby

5

I think it’s best to think of toshokan as a existing word in spoken conversation. Kanji – letters, are just used to guess how to read signs.

Actually it can be broken down, just not in the way you think

It doesn’t break arbitrarily into syllables, but into root words 図書(としょ) + 館(かん). A Japanese children might be able to read としょ館(かん), but that would be rare in adult books.

I am sure you can get library out of 図書(としょ) + 館(かん).

It’s somewhat similar to a libra-ry, if you separate the final first.

How you think li-bra-ry is pronounced? How would pronounce “li” without context?

Maybe you can have some doubts with starting from Kanji and written characters.

A spoken quiz might be,

What building do you want to go to find a classic reference book?

How do you call “library” in Japanese?

What is that building you have walked past by?

They’re really just squiggles

Simple stuff are certainly highly contrived. Rarer stuff are less contrived. (and you can end up as bad at reading exceptional words as natives, don’t worry)

That being said, written materials are just hard in their own way, even if you might know some of the spoken Japanese.

radicals are made up and only good for dictionary reference?

Another thing to keep in mind, is that Kanji may get simplified or altered during the thousands of years, and it may lose connection to their parts. 館 is generally just a building, not having anything to eat.

In Chinese, it’s simplified differently, 圖書館 / 图书馆. So indeed, radicals are made up here. People don’t agree with what is in the 口.

6

Think of WaniKani’s made up radicals as optional scaffolding that you can erect around your kanji-learning “construction site” to make learning easier to navigate. When you look at a kanji and all you see is just squiggles then, having learned the “radicals” and used the mnemonics, you can attempt to break down the kanji into radicals and see if you can remember having memorised a made up story involving all those elements and that may help you place what you previously percieved as “just squiggles” – it’s easier to memorise 200-ish made up radicals and then use them as landmarks for learning 2000+ kanji than it is to learn 2000+ kanji as just a collection of arbitrary squiggles.

But you

and so do we, so what do you mean by saying they’re only

The WK radicals don’t even overlap completely with official radicals (iirc) since they’re not intended to aid with dictionary lookup but rather with memorisation.

Anyway, good luck with your studies:)

7

eventually you’re going to have to link pictures writing eating bureaucrat to the sound toshokan and not zushoyakata and then link the meaning to library.

新幹線 shinkansen not atarakansen?? and is it new stem line or new trunk line or new trunk wire… if you’re lucky you’ll stumble on new main line and maybe figure out what the Japanese call it: the bullet train.

picture a writing eating bureaucrat inside the new trunk wire.

yes… kanji atomics are useful. sooner or later it’s back to memorizing squiggles and using the radicals to look up 3, 4- kanji words in dictionaries to find actual meaning.

I’m not saying this process has no value because there are many kanji atomics. but start making compounds and those radicals are more useful for dictionary lookup than making sense of what’s staring back at you from the page. kanji are words but they also act like our letters. daisy chain a few together and just like pterodactyl, it gets weird really fast.

has anyone done a double blind study to prove learning radicals actually makes learning kanji easier or is maybe that just anecdotal…

i got some more reviews to do so I can finish this in one year or less. thanks for chatting.

8

Well, as has been pointed out, you don’t have to use radicals if you find they don’t work for you.
Different people are different.
I, on the other hand, find radicals to be extremely useful.
It’s much easier to remember kanji when you remember which elements it consists of.
There doesn’t have to be deep connection between them, one just needs to remember the elements themselves

浮 – tsunami, cleat and child are floating in the wild!
受 – cleat, forhead, stool – accept, you, fool! (an insulting mnemonic, but it makes it easier to remember)
黄 – blackjack is the reason the fins turned yellow

Again, it’s perfectly normal that different people are different and what works for one – doesn’t work for another. But you seem to be implying that just because this doesn’t work for you – it doesn’t work for others either… Which is not really the case.
Anyway, whichever method you use – best of luck with your studies! wricat

9

^Thats not how it works, the mnemonics are temporary scaffolding – once you have established a firm connection between the kanji as a whole and a meaning/sound (say after a few weeks/months, give or take – this will differ case by case) you take it down and you’re no longer registering the radicals while reading the kanji. Unless you’ve recently started learning the kanji (or you’ve forgotten it) you won’t be thinking about the radical composition when learning new words using the kanji.

^Very true, but WK doesn’t ask you to connect the meaning and pronunciation of compound words to the individual radicals. At that point you’re seeing the kanji as a whole and associating one or more meanings/readings with the kanji (not the radicals and the kanji mnemonics) and you go from there.

Good luck and thanks for chatting – I’m rooting for you :flexed_biceps:

10

Library makes sense here though

図書館
図 = Picture/Diagram/maps/images
書 = Write (books)
館 = Public Building

The building that has books and maps/diagrams (which would have been found in some scrolls).

You only went at the radical level for the last kanji, not for the first two.
But yes, eat + bureaucrat = public building. Because I guess it signifies a cafeteria where they ate or something.

Radicals go into making kanji.
But the radicals are not necessarily part of multi-kanji compound words. Once that becomes “public building”, it can become any type of public building regardless of whether food or bureaucrats are involved.

But anyway, you don’t have to worry about radicals if you don’t want to. They’re mostly there so you can make mnemonics, or to learn to tell apart similar looking kanji. If you’re one of those people who can learn it without them, go ahead.

Also a little side note, the “radicals” that WK use aren’t always what the actual Japanese government would recognize as radicals. One of the reasons I stopped caring about WK radicals, and instead just started cheating through them to pass them immediately, is that some of them just seem to be whatever they needed it to be for some mnemonic they made, and it was driving me nuts. I prefer to look at radicals from an actual dictionary instead if I get confused between different kanji.

11

what’s the story behind grass ground rice paddy as blackjack? is it blackjack the gambling game? kind of looks maybe like a poker table :thinking:

12

Blackjack is 龷
Reason is 由
Fins are ハ

As to why they are called this way – I have no idea, I’ve just memorized them that way

13

From the wanikani page

You have the radical twenty and the kanji one. Put those together and you get 21. What’s another name for 21? That’s blackjack.

The radical looks like it has 2 crosses, and a line underneath. that’s two tens and a one, 十十一.

Blackjack is a card game, in which the most important part to us here is that you need to score as high as possible without exceeding 21: known as a blackjack.

14

just to add my two cents, I don’t always memorize with what wk says. sometimes I just remember them instinctively, and I kind of like when I’m able to do that, because it means I can recall their meaning faster when I have to read, though often it means when I do forget I don’t have a “fallback” to try to recover the meaning or reading.
The yellow one, I am sure I don’t remember. I just see it as a yellow tree growing over a paddy field. the tree part also helps me remember the reading: ki.

15

I’m not into radicals nether and some of them are quite far from being close to the shown lines, but instead I try to create my own names. In wanikani I remember my reaction when I met radical Triceratops, and i was like “a…stop, wait, what?“ and put my synonym for this dino)) So even now i don’t remember it, so i went to radicals to find it))

16

In this case it’s more like “map and book hall”. Think of hall as a word that would have referred to a communal food hall, but then would have also been used to refer to any public hall or building. It’s often used nowadays for community centers (公民館) gyms (体育館), etc. As for maps and books, well, that’s what you’d find at a library. Not just maps but diagrams in general.