Should I create my own radicals?

I have been going through a radical deck based on RTK recently and I was replacing the original names for primitives with my own as I find it easier to memorise that way. However, it occurred to me that the original radical names are often based on the actual meaning of the symbols, and in learning it with the original definitions I may be able to glean the meaning of Kanji I don’t know by noticing what combination of radicals it uses. Is this actually the case, does it work like this? If I make my own names for the radicals, will this impact my understand of Kanji in the future?

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Thanks 🙂

3 comments
  1. It sounds like you are making things harder for yourself. If you insist on sticking with RTK, just use the names provided.

    Otherwise for the components that actually have a common form just use their actual names.

  2. **”I’m learning medicine, and I am replacing all the names of the different bones with my own names because I find it easier to remember those. Will this impact my ability to understand other literature about anatomy at a later date?”**

  3. Sure, but if you do, you’ll run in to some confusion in the future when browsing RTK vol 3 for example.

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