Is Kanji radicals that important?

4 comments

1. At the very least you should familiarise yourself with them. It’s much easier to identify the components of a kanji when you understand the radicals and their foundations. Its also important to be able to actually write them too as it helps cement them (and by extension, vocab too) in your memory.

   An app I’d personally recommend for writing practice would be JA sensei. That paired with Remembering the Kanji would help you by leaps and bounds.

2. You don’t need to learn 214 radicals “first”, or even all of them ever. There are a **total** of 214 radicals in the Kangxi system, and they get as complicated as 龜 (turtle) and 龠 (flute).

   Radicals are parts of a character that give you a clue to its meaning, but often this works better for memorising them once you have learned the character already (rather than using the radical to guess the character’s meaning)

   Just think of them as elements that recur across multiple characters and remember them as and when you come across them.

3. >but I never *learn Kanji* so now I want to start.

   It’s not clear what you want to do. What does ‘*learn Kanji*’ mean? There are several levels to this; in order of difficulty…

   1. Learning to read words (meaning & pronunciation) that have kanji in them. You’ve probably already done some of this.
   2. As 1 above, but learning how to write the words as well (with or without stroke order).
   3. Learning to recognize individual kanji in isolation from words – learning the most common meanings & perhaps the most common onyomi & kunyomi readings.
   4. As 3 above but learning how to write the kanji as well (with stroke order).
   5. Learn to read and write kanji in isolation with all possible meanings and readings.

   If you never intend to hand write Japanese (but just type it from a keyboard) then there is little reason (particularly at your stage of learning) to go any farther than point 1.

   As a casual user of Japanese, you’ll get diminishing returns for 3 and above.

   If you do decide to learn how to write Japanese then learning the 214 radicals can be useful. Kanji are made up of one or more components. For each kanji, one of its components will be deemed to be its ‘radical’. Radicals are useful for looking up kanji in paper dictionaries. If you never intend to use paper dictionaries (i.e. you use online or electronic dictionaries) then learning radicals is of little benefit. However – as the radicals are components of many kanji then learning to recognize and write them goes some way to learning how to write parts of kanji. So it’s not entirely useless and there are only 214 of them (not many compared to the number of kanji).

4. You don’t have to worry about radicals now.

   I think radicals get more useful at the point where you need to tell the difference between 建 and 健 and other kanji that are easily confused with each other, and that are the same except for the radical. Eventually there are just too many of them to deal with through rote memorization, and it’s helpful to learn them in a more systematic way.