I’ll go first.
For example, you learn that “roll” is 転…
Then you learn that “carry” is 運…
Then you learn that “to drive” (a word you recognise from your beginner Japanese studies) is 運転する and it suddenly hits you as to WHY that word sounds the way it does. Up until this point it was just a series of sounds, u-n-te-n-su-ru, but now you realise it’s made of building blocks that mean something, and it all seems so beautifully elegant.
Rinse and repeat, multiple times per WaniKani level!
I’ve been back in lessons for 2 minutes and it just happened again.
地下鉄 - subway
Sure helps with remembering names, too. Just had a mild example this level. The Seaside train line, what was that called again? I’ve always just had to remember it like a person’s name. Ah yes, the Rinkai line.
Guess what 臨海 means. It’s not just an arbitrary name, it’s a description.
Which is not to say that’s surprising to me, but if you don’t know the words, it doesn’t work
Kanji are definitely awesome, there are so many moments in my learning process when I thought “damn that’s so cool”.
The ones like 森 or 螢 ; 雨 that looks like water drops on a window, 霖 for “long rains” where you can imagine being in the middle of a forest where it’s raining, 儚 for the word 儚い which means “ephemeral, transient, fleeting” which is easy to remember if you already know 夢.
The kanji 花 made of “change” and “grass” ; we can find the “change” part in the word for chemistry : 化学. The kanji for dragon : 龍 where the right part definitely looks like one, with a little bit of imagination 
秋 with the left part looking like a tree and the right part being the fire. 覚 which can be used for “waking up” and looking like rays of light striking the eye on his two legs ; 明 being composed of “moon” and “sun”… there are probably so many others that I’m not thinking about right now, but yes, even if they take so much time to learn and that they can be really painful sometimes, I think that Japanese would not be as beautiful without them.
Not just the right part, but the whole kanji is a pictogram.
立 is its open mouth, 月 its belly (the dragon is half standing) and 上己三in the right are the crests on its back and the curly tail (the end of the 己 part).
Note that the simplified form used in japanese (竜）is actually a variant as old as the other, and also a pictogram, but seen from a different angle.
龍:
https://images.app.goo.gl/upmL6wT5uw4gH3Be8
竜 is coming right at you (I didn’t find a better picture):
https://images.app.goo.gl/j1dgMoCFsMJjeYrw9
I just checked it up on the Outlier Dictionary in the Kanji Study app, and it says that 立 was actually a comb on his head, like the one of a rooster… The 月 part is apparently the mouth ; the S shape is the body and the three lines 三 were only added later for “decorative purposes” (surely the crests on the back like you say).
i like this positive attitude! because everyone hates kanji. i guess that’s understandable. but positivity is nice.
Ironically it was the only part I liked about my forced Mandarin classes in school…
they forced you to take mandarin of all things?! over here it’s spanish.
English (British school), Mandarin & another foreign language (I took Spanish). The Mandarin classes are probably why I found WaniKani’s radicals a little weird in the beginning since we were taught to look at the kanji like 他 has the radical “standing person” & 家 has the radical “pig”; i.e. all kanji have only one radical, and they were completely different to what WaniKani taught later a lot of the time 
I think I barely scraped by in the oral part of the classes though…よく興味がなかったよ 
Hah. At my school here in Australia, we had to take French and another language, and I chose Mandarin. 
My mistake was choosing to continue it after the point where languages became electives, because few enough people chose to continue doing Mandarin that I wound up in a combined background/non-background class, and haha that was not fun.
Well, to be fair to Mandarin, that’s how native Japanese students learn too.
We tend to like kanji here.
我們喜歓漢字
(中国語は読むの、書くのができるが話せないよ）
今日は鰐と蟹の字を学ぶ
(鍔、鋼(玉鋼から）、滅、刃、炭も …どんな漫画を読でいるかな)
I still feel like WK would have done better to not use the word “radical” here. RTK uses “component” and I think that’s more explanatory to people who don’t know any Japanese yet and avoids the confusion with the traditional radical system.
