Worth learning the radicals?

8 comments

1. It is generally a waste of time to learn radicals for the sake of learning radicals.

   If you want to incorporate Phono-Semantic Decomposition into your learning (alongside more practical/productive things), when you learn a new character take note of its

   (1) Dictionary Radical

   (2) Phonetic Component(s) (may not be as helpful in Japanese)

   (3) Semantic Component(s)

   (4) Other Component(s) (that are leftover)

   To help you learn and remember the structure of the Character and its meaning

2. I’d say it’s about whether you recognize them in kanji that matters. Knowing the radicals won’t really help much without being able to recognize them in an actual character. This way, the more kanji you learn, the more symbols you’ll recognize and then be able to use to remember how something is written, but only look up the meaning of the symbol AFTER recognizing it in a character first.

3. It helps.

4. Eh, it can help add a layer of recall to kanji you know, but I’ve found it’s a little more likely to result in this conversation:

   Coworker who knows you know a little japanese: Hey, what’s this say?

   You: Well, this part means this, and this other part means this.

   Coworker: So what’s it mean?

   You: Idunno, but I can put it in a search tool and get linked through to wikinary.

5. I didn’t learn the radicals explicitly, but I did/still do learn kanji via components and mnemonics, which often includes the radicals.

   So for example 借 I know as 亻and 昔. Then 昔 itself is 龷 (which is a made up component for mnemonic purposes and not its own radical or kanji) plus 日.

   For me that’s been very helpful, especially as I get up to kanji like 魔 or 麗 to be able to compose it. To me 魔 is two pieces rather than 21 strokes. So I can quickly recall it and eventually I can just reproduce it without the mnemonics at all.

   I couldn’t tell you which part of the kanji are the official radicals you would use for a dictionary lookup, but so far that hasn’t held me back from learning them effectively. Eventually I want to learn it, but it’s a lot priority.

6. I didn’t learn radicals…I jumped straight into kanji. With time, you learn to just recognize similar kanji and start to be able to be able to take an educated guess as to onyomi of kanji you haven’t even seen before. For me, I started recognizing this kind of stuff around N2 kanji studies

7. I wouldn’t recommend to study them from a dictionary from A to Z, but it certainly does help to know them, also it often helps you figure out the meaning. And it will be useful if you ever want to describe a kanji to a Japanese person when asking for something

8. Personally, I found it very helpful when memorizing the more complex kanji, or kanji that look very similar to others.