After getting hiragana and katakana down by following tofogu’s guide, I began with Kanji today.
I’m trying out the free wanikani but something is bothering me.
I do agree with the logic of learning radicals first, but when I look at [these guys](https://ibb.co/9HNrTC1) I don’t know which ones are serious and which ones are “jokes” (to make it easy to remember). So I don’t know which are the ones I should really commit myself to and which are the ones that I’m to take with a grain of salt, so to speak.
I think the question is, how do I know if a radical is just a radical and I should simply remember its existence, or if it’s a kanji and I have to make an anki card and everything? Because radicals have no meaning/pronunciation so I can just note it and move on, right?
I’m no stranger to learning languages but Japanese is the first one with a different alphabet. Advice is appreciated.
5 comments
You can’t know so take everything as ‘not an actual kanji’ until you see the actual kanji. Also, some that are kanji, like 十 in the picture, have names that don’t correlate to their meaning
(7 of these arent kanji, 2 that are have unrelated names)
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 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.
Wanikani is color coded. Light blue is radical. Pink is kanji. Purple is vocab. All of which can over lap. So you can have a single symbol be radical, kanji, and vocab. You just have to know.
You are learning radicals, not kanji. All of them are “jokes” to make it easier to remember them. But remembering them will make it easier to study kanji afterwards.
If some of the radical happen to be a complete kanji as well, that is pure coincidence
So I’m almost through lvl 4 and liking wanikani a lot so far.
It will tell you what is a radical and what is a kanji. Some kanji will be made up of one radical, others of several. The radicals fit in with the mnemonics used to remember the kanji (and the vocabulary they also teach you). Because there’s no sounds etc to remember for a radical I find they tend to click fast and you won’t unlock related kanji until you’ve correctly identified the radical a few times anyways (when it lvls up to guru, which is five repetitions usually).
I don’t add anything from wani to an anki deck because wani already has its own SRS system and I find that’s enough for me (at this point at least). I just do my reviews and lessons when they become available and I have the time. As someone else mentioned: the nice thing about wani for me is that I don’t have to bother with all the extra stuff, they’ve already planned everything out and I can just follow along.