Hello all! I am a self learning Japanese student and I have gotten a ton of amazing advice from this community! I am reaching out to you all today because I want to make sure I’m not learning something I shouldn’t be.
I just started the WaniKani Kanji radicals and want to make sure I’m studying right.
Do the radicals stand alone as the words they are describing? Like how 口 would be “kuchi くち” and 女 would be “onna おんな”
I’ve been having trouble with some of the radicals like “leaf” and “barb” and just want to make sure I’m learning the right things 😅
Would you all say it’s worth learning the radicals or should I just jump into kanji? My memorization skills are pretty good I’d say so either or works for me. ありがとう！！
9 comments
https://imgur.com/gallery/PgMvhPc
These are how my notes are looking so far, if anybody has any suggestions please let me know! Thank you for your time!
>just want to make sure I’m learning the right things
IMO the point of using WaniKani is that you don’t have to worry about such things yourself. If you like it, just follow their system and trust that it will work for you like it worked for others. On the other hand, if you want to figure out all the details for yourself then I would not bother with WK. Just look up the most common radicals on Wikipedia and use Anki and make up your own mnemonics.
You’re running too fast. You will be introduced to the relevant readings when you learn kanjis (mostly onyomi) and vocabulary (a mix if onyomi and kunyomi).
What you wrote down is sometimes correct but for instance the radical fins or drop don’t stand for those words at all, and the radicals ground and cross are numbers on their own.
Just relax and do the reviews. In a couple of days you’ll have more than enough lessons and reviews to keep you busy and feel that you are learning.
Most of the radicals ARE also kanji themselves, although some of them are now rare or obscure. Or they look a bit different as the radical. For example, water is 水, but the water radical looks like what you see on the left side of these characters. 涙 河 江.
Some radicals stand alone as kanji, like 女 and 口. Some radicals do stand alone as kanji, but in different shapes – so for example, the left side of 係 is 人, but it looks different when it’s used as a radical. Similarly, the top of 池 is 水, but it looks different when it’s used as a radical.
There are some radicals that aren’t kanji. The radical for 病 痢 癌 is used for illnesses and similar things, but it doesn’t come from a kanji and doesn’t have a separate meaning. (It does have a name – やまいだれ).
Radicals are a bit of a nuanced topic. They don’t really directly correlate to the meaning of the word all the time so knowing a radical’s meaning doesn’t always help aside from maybe giving you some general clues with certain ones like 言 or ⻌. But those are patterns you can come to recognize naturally without directed study to radicals themselves.
What I’ve found them mainly useful for is that recognizing them allows you to break down complex kanji into more “digestible” parts that makes them easier to remember and visualize in your head. Being able to think of a complex kanji as a combination of 3 or 4 simpler radicals can make it much easier to process than having each one be a completely independent jumble of strokes. It can also help with learning stroke order as multiradical kanji are usually drawn radical-by-radical.
With that in mind, you don’t need to necessarily devote much time to studying radicals on their own, as you will develop familiarity with most of them just by studying kanji normally. I would proceed to just start studying N5 kanji, as many of the radicals you’ve got listed in your notebook ARE N5 kanji anyway.
Some of the radicals are stand-alone kanji and some are just used in pieces of other kanji.
If you are going to use WK, let it decide what order to teach you stuff in (that’s the point).
kanji components (not radicals per se, radicals are a subset that are used for identifying a kanji, not every “piece”) are helpful for memorizing kanji, just don’t expect them to always make some precise narrative sense
also a general reminder that kanji aren’t words and that memorizing kanji is just a helper process for learning vocabulary, not an end in it’s own. it’s only useful to the degree that spending time memorizing kanji actually helps with having vocab stick. likewise, memorizing components is only useful to the degree that it helps kanji stick in your head
you’ll have to assess for yourself the amount of component / kanji / vocab time or effort to spend, as it’s different for everyone, but something closer to 10/10/80 is likely to be closer to appropriate rather than 33/33/33 or something like that
Some definitions first:
* Kani are characters that are made up of one or more components.
* One of the components that make up a kanji character will be designated as its radical. The primary purpose for the radical is that it is used as an index into paper based dictionaries which are organized by radical.
* A radical appearing in a kanji may also appear as a normal component (i.e. not a radical) of a different kanji.
* A lot of people (incorrectly) call all the components of a kanji ‘radicals’ – probably because they can be radicals of other kanji.
FYI: [Some more information](https://www.joyokanji.com/radical-terms) about radicals.
​
>Do the radicals stand alone as the words they are describing?
Some simple kanji (like 口 or 女) consist of single components (which, by definition must also be their radical). Some components can only be used with others in kanji (e.g. 氵*water radical*).
​
>Would you all say it’s worth learning the radicals or should I just jump into kanji?
It won’t hurt as there’s not that many of them anyway. If you want to hand write kanji (many people don’t) then learning the radicals/components will help. Learning them may also help you recognize kanji when you come to learn those kanji. To be honest though, you’ll soon get to know the components of kanji anyway even if you don’t specifically learn the radicals/components.
Note that knowing the components of a kanji may not help you guess its meaning. E.g. the single kanji word for cat is 猫 which is made up of three components – the ‘dog’ radical (yes, ‘dog’), a ‘field’ component and a ‘grass’ component. There is a reason for this, but you won’t guess it just by knowing the components.
**My Preference**: As a beginner, I’d say you have better things to learn first than radicals/components, or even kanji. [My advice](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) is to simply learn kanji in the context of the words they appear in – i.e. learn vocabulary. That way you’ll learn all the kanji and readings you’ll need to, as you’ll learn all the words you need to.