Why triceratops radical?

I love dinosaurs, so I loved the Triceratops radical! I still buy dino figurines. Here’s a picture of my trikes I took.

One of my favorite games is Ark Survival Evolved where I get to raise baby trikes.

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I feel ashamed that I thought that narwhals were mythical creatures up until a few years ago. Just like big foot, the loch Ness monster, or Al Gore.

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:slight_smile: It’s okay, not many people know about narwhals unless someone close to them is interested in marine history/biology. I knew about them because my dad explained what scrimshaw was when I was a kid and how it was made on narwhal tooth.

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Googling scrimshaw…

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Like wtf is admonish that sounds like the dessert the devil eats.

IT DOES THOUGH OH

I know narwhales (correct plural?) because of starwhal just the tip.

Petition to make all wanikani mnemonics dinosaurs :sauropod: :t_rex:

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Just came across this one and tried to add it to my Quizlet flash card set but couldn’t copy/paste the radical and ended up googling it…only to find out it actually wasn’t a radical.

Triceratops, hat, leaf, gun etc…I have no problems if these are added as memorization tools but when WaniKani specifically states they are radicals when they aren’t then I am learning something that isn’t correct. I have a problem with that because it opens me up to mistakes later. I asked my Japanese friend and she was like ‘yeah,that doesn’t exist’.

If they are memorization tools cool, awesome, call them that, call them anything other than radicals. Learning any language is difficult enough without being intentionally misled.

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WaniKani isn’t the only time you’ll hear “radical” used to mean “any part of a kanji” rather than “a part of a kanji used for dictionary categorization.”

IIRC, Koichi has said that he basically agrees that it’s not the best word to have used. But it’s also just the reality that it has a both a “general” and a “specific” meaning in the Japanese learning community.

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My 4-year-old says “sky water” and “earth shake”. he believes they are real synonyms :smiley:

Well, Wanikani can always just stop calling them radicals. It’s a lot easier fix than fiddling with the graphic design, the SRS stages, and the API and whatever else they’ve been up to lately.

My childhood was spent watching land before time and bug life on repeat for like a year or two after school and just falling asleep; to start a new day. Good times