Why doesn't Wanikani treat all kanji as radicals?

WaniKani Requesting Help
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With the spaceship next time?

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Koichi just confirmed that the Day of Reckoning is in three years

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I love PonPon’s Bob Ross videos SO MUCH.

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OMG Koichi is alive!!! :scream_cat: :scream_cat: :scream_cat:

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This is getting ridiculous:

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There’s an entire mother standing in there, waiting to be acknowledged, and yet Tofugu ignores the mother in the room as if she were a mother elephant.

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elephant-in-the-room-cartoon-2

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The bad thing is there is no 日 (4 strokes) at all here. The enclosing around the two dots is 3 strokes, none of which is the same as those in 日.

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Uh, what? How have I never realised that before?

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Yes, wanikani mnemonics are often out of sync with strokes, which makes it hard to use them if you’re also learning to write while using wanikani…

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I’m manually doing this at the moment and it’s a pain in the butt, especially considering this is a paid product. Honestly, I don’t care about the money, it’s just an extremely inefficient use of my time and makes it so I have to learn multiple kanji at once. I use ChatGPT to break down the kanji into components to see if there’s any kanji being used that I haven’t learned yet.

For example, the kanji 賞 (しょう, meaning “prize” or “reward”) is composed of the following components:

  1. 貝 (かい, meaning “shell” or “shellfish”): This is the bottom component, which is often associated with money or valuables in kanji.
  2. 尚 (しょう, meaning “esteem” or “furthermore”): This is the top component and tells us the reading.

It seems that when kanji are composed of multiple kanji/radicals, you can often get a sense of the meaning from one of them and the reading from the other. This makes it waaaaay easier to remember (e.g. the SHOGUN sent you on an ESTEEMED task to retrieve a REWARD from a giant SHELLFISH). It’s superior to trying to remember a convoluted mnemonic made out of 3-5 radicals.

So…

  1. Whenever a kanji is used in another kanji, use that kanji as it often will allow you to infer the meaning and reading.
  2. Reorder lessons to make this work. E.g. we should learn 尚 (LV54) and 貝 (LV12) before 賞 (LV13)
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I’m a bit late here, but you don’t have to do this manually, get the book “kodansha kanji learner’s course” and it builds up consistently in the way you’re trying to recreate yourself

But normally people do one or the other (wk or kklc). Referencing both isn’t a great use of time, but would save you time compared to what you described above