For instance the Kanji for “sound” (音), contains the radicals for “stand” (立) and “sun” (日). How do those two things have anything to do with sound?
Is it just that the meanings have changed over centuries of use / simplifying characters etc, or is it just that Kanji aren’t really meant to “tell a story”.
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The forms for Characters have changed throughout the centuries, gradually as well as suddenly through processes such as 隸變. Meanings have shifted as well.
For 音 its form was closer to something like 言 + 曰 (not 日), but ultimately sources differ (like 言 + 一) and I’m not an expert.
Kanji are Chinese Characters, which are Phono-Semantic Logo-Syllabograms. They don’t necessarily “tell a specific story”, but they certainly have a lot to tell a reader.
Often times components have been simplified over time.
If you want to know the origin of a kanji just Google it’s etymology.
[音](https://kanjinonaritachi.com/1856.html)
Let’s get one thing straight:
As far as most resources not related to RTK are concerned, they all tend to agree that the word “radical” corresponds to the Japanese word **部首**. 部首 refers to the *one* part by which a kanji is organized (i.e. in physical dictionaries). This 部首 also has a strong tendency to hint at a given kanji’s meaning, even though the connection might demand a lot of explaining to a modern person. Note that this isn’t always the case, depending on the type of kanji.
Not all components are radicals, nor do they all impart meaning, despite what RTK might have led you to believe. Hell, he doesn’t even use the term “radical” for his stuff.
A lot of the time, the part that isn’t the radical ends up giving the kanji its sound — specifically its on’yomi. With all that in mind, you should be able to identify the radical and the sound component if you put stuff like 議, 儀, and 犠 side by side to compare and contrast.
Some kanji are made up of radicals that give meaning, some are made up of radicals that give *sound* and some are a combination of those and others. That’s why you should focus on the kanji and not the radical meaning. The main reason, at least as a foreigner learning Japanese, to learn the radicals is to identify the main radical so you can locate unknown kanji in a dictionary, as most are organised or search by radicals.