Why can’t we “learn the particular [radical’s] look as a separate, arbitrary thing, one you have to put special mental effort into remembering”? There’s no reason this can only be done for kanji.
Looking up what kanji use certain radicals helps for review, once you’ve learned a couple of similar kanji and start to confuse them. They may or may not be in the “similar kanji” section. The reasons you list are good, too.
So I was talking about unique cases, like Lovely 麗. The kanji 麗 lovely is the only kanji using that radical, so they’re both in Lesson 28 (but the kanji will only unlock once the radical is ‘passed’, meaning, graduated to Guru I).
So why does the radical Lovely 麗 even exist? Because this particular kanji is visually very difficult to break down. I see Compare 比 in there, definitely, at the bottom, but what about the rest? Is that a Flag 尸? No… it’s a Canopy 广. Is that Music 曲? No—it’s missing a stroke. (But probably not the one you think, looking at it in the font WaniKani uses! Look at it in a handwriting font or in a stroke-order animation to see which stroke is actually missing.)
What a mess! But unfortunately, the kanji 麗 itself is relatively important—it’s needed to read 綺麗 (きれい, pretty) — which is usually written in kana alone, but not always!
In other words: 麗 lovely is a special case. In terms of working fluidly witinh the WaniKani system—it’s a failure. Unlike other kanji that you break down into radicals you can make a story about, this one you just have to memorize, brute-force, in whole cloth.
As I wrote, that requires “special mental effort [for] remembering”. If every kanji in WaniKani were treated this way, then there would be no no recognition of the “special effort” required in learning 麗 — it would be presented exactly like learning 期 (キ, period of time), which would be ludicrous — since 期 is obviously composed of two other radicals you already have seen elsewhere. Learning 期 is much easier than learning 麗.
And also, if every kanji in WaniKani were treated this way, then WaniKani wouldn’t really have any reason to exist—it would just be a curated list and ordering of kanji and vocab. Which isn’t nothing—but you can get decent curated Anki decks, too.
No, WaniKani’s value is in the mnemonics and the building-block radicals, so that you don’t have to brute-force memorize each new kanji like this. It’s hard to see the difference earlier on (what level are you at?) because everything is a new shape you just have to memorize. But soon enough, 80% or more of the new kanji you see will be composed entirely of component radicals you already know, and then you can learn them, not as a thing to just memorize by itself—that purely arbitrary memorization that we humans have such limited capacity for—but as a story of radicals interacting. And humans are pretty good at remembering narratives.
Is that clearer? Or do I still not get what you’re arguing?
鹿 is good as both radical and Kanji for a vocabulary.
The top isn’t very difficult to break down when you realize. Also it’s lovely in Chinese.
Not really. But it sounds like you’re agreeing with me. Radicals can be taught as a separate, arbitrary thing you have to put special mental effort into remembering. It can be done before learning a kanji that consists entirely of that radical.
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