Is “strong radicals” even a term? I just stole that from Kanjidamage.
If you don’t know what I mean, it’s essentially radicals which pretty much have a reading.
I’m not sure how many people here figured this out on their own, that the right side radical of a kanji is very likely to be a radical that dictates the on’yomi, while the left side radical is often one that dictates the meaning of the kanji.
I personally noticed some pattern eventually, for instance that 工 is always read as こう, but I’d lie if I said I noticed all strong radicals. Took me until just now that I noticed that 義 is always read as ぎ.
WaniKani does mention occassionally in some of its mnemonics that a kanji is very likely to be read a certain way if a certain radical appears, but this is
Maybe so, there used to (and may still be) an add-on user script that pointed those out. I like that they’re occasionally mentioning that in the mnemonic lessons too.
I (and this is personal preference) really enjoy discovering that on my own, having those light bulb moments. It’s very satisfying. And also considering it a weak theory and watching for it. But sometimes if you present it as a rule, then the exceptions make you wrong a lot and that’s almost as frustrating as not knowing the general rule in the first place.
(Rendaku, same situation. You kind of get a feel for it after a while and it’s satisfying to guess right, but there’s no rule you can name that won’t have 1000 exceptions)
God yes. After realizing that every kanji with the mohawk radical is pronounced てき, I made my own anki deck of radical pronunciations. That easily eliminted the need to learn readings for several hundred kanji.
The keisei script is really good, I recommend it. More generally I completely agree that it’s a big missed opportunity, in the late levels I would often guess/remember of a good chunk of the kanji using phonetic components. I complained about it here: It feels like WK somewhat loses its way partway through
This is a useful skill outside of WaniKani of course, for instance the other day I managed to guess the reading of 鱗 by recognizing the phonetic component of 隣.
My only guess as to why WaniKani doesn’t do that is because it wouldn’t be very useful in the early levels so they used the weird English mnemonics instead and later on it would add more constraints to their “radical” system of they want it to match the real phonetic and semantic components.
