My question is about the WINTER radical 夂, is this extra stroke version 攵, just a variation? Wanikani just has both as WINTER with no explanation. Jisho lists 攵 as FOLDING CHAIR and 夂 as the WINTER radical. I don’t care about the radical names used but I wish there would be an explanation when radicals with the same name are clearly different. For example, just a note saying sometimes it’s written with 4 strokes not three. Even if you ignore stroke count (which I don’t), they still don’t look the same. Any help would be much appreciated.
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It’s a wanikani thing. Those radicals are “close enough” in their opinion, so they have combined them. They do this in other cases as well, like 王 and the right part of 任. They seem to be more concerned that the radical looks like it’s there than the stroke order being right.
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And then there’s the 易 radical, which appears as 昜 in literally every kanji taught on WaniKani aside from 易 itself.
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攵 is usually about making an action, while 夂 meaning is kinda varied. They aren’t variants.
Some radicals/components in reality may come from multiple origins, and the radical meaning may not really contribute to the composed Kanji. (As the components may drift away from the actual origin, like via simplification and variation in writing.)
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I see I’ll just have to deal with it then, I’ve been calling 攵 LONG WINTER so I can remember how to write it. I’ve experienced EASY and complained about it already. To be fair they did change the kanji LOCATION mnemonic to reflect the extra stroke after. The others i don’t think so, not yet anyway. Cheers.
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I think the most aggressive instance of this is when WaniKani decided that 垂 was the same thing as 車 (but 乗 is 禾＋口…).
If you decide to learn to write the kanji you’ll have to use different mnemonics, but WaniKani is mainly concerned with recognition.
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Basically, WK radicals are made up approximations.
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This is true, but merging two components which are written differently in different kanji is a WK specific twist on this general idea. For instance RTK does not merge the two components we’re talking about here, but gives them different names. Similarly with the two different components that WK merges into one “spirit” radical. This matters if you want to learn to write the characters, because it’s exactly the kind of subtle difference that mnemonics can help you remember.
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WaniKani historically made radicals without bothering about the meaning of the resultant Kanji, but made them “mnemonics first”, so spirit used to be pelican. (Winter was winter, though.)
imo, radical meaning isn’t only about writing but also about meaning. Spirit without a dot will always be spirit, while spirit with a dot will always be clothes. Winter with 4 strokes will always be “taskmaster”. That is, the looks of radicals do have a meaning sometimes, even if WaniKani says they only have “names”, and WaniKani radicals aren’t traditional radicals nor Kanji.
There are indeed cases that one radical can have more than one meanings, and WaniKani probably wants to avoid that dilemma, using “names” instead – until WaniKani users protested and radical name overhauled to be more like traditional ones. (Though, components, rather than the only radical for paper dictionary references.)
As I said earlier, sometimes radicals / components may not contribute to Kanji meanings at all, if considering via the actual etymology.
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To add to that, it’s hard to blame WaniKani for taking such liberties when you see how much of a mess this component/radical concept is at large. 月 is moon, but as a radical it’s often a form of 肉, and also 前 and 揃 have the same component but the 月 is drawn a bit differently.
青 is often drawn with 円 instead of 月 in many common kanji like 錆 although I believe that both variants are technically possible. KRADFILE decomposes it with 月 for instance, which makes the jisho part data look bogus at a glance:
迷 is in 謎 but the latter version keeps the two 、 in the ⻌ instead of using the simplified version. You have a similar situation with 連 and 漣. You also have 辿 and a handful of other kanji using the traditional ⻌ even in single kanji form for some reason.
龍 is simplified into 竜, but the common jouyou kanji 籠 and 襲 keep the traditional form even though you’d expect that using the simplified form in components would be even more convenient. 龍 is not jouyou.
Similarly 仮 is a simplified form of 假, but 暇 is not simplified in the same way. That also obfuscates that 仮 and 暇 actually share the same phonetic component for the カ reading.
The semantic component in 旗 and 施 is actually 㫃 which is apparently unrelated to either 方 or 人.
These are just the oddities and inconsistencies I can think off the top of my head, I could probably find dozens more. They make any systematic, etymologically-accurate decomposition of kanji effectively impractically complicated, you have to take shortcuts somewhere.
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I call 夂"nomata", because it is ノ又 ;
and 攵 I call it “noichime”, because it is ノーメ.
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Hey simias! Just want to let you know that we are planning to add ‘dangle’ as a radical in one of our upcoming updates to our content. Keep an eye out for that!
-Nick at WK
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Oh that’s nice, I do think that the existing 車/垂 was a bit of a stretch (although I admit that the idea of a wrecked car with dangling bits was a decent mnemonic).
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