Hey everyone, I’m new to learning japanese and I’ve finally been stepping my foot into kanji. I’ve learned a few, however I don’t undestand a bit about “radicals”. I didn’t even know what they were until watching a video on it. So, exactly where do I go to learn about radicals? I can’t seem to find good resources for learning radicals. I assume they are an important aspect to learning kanji, so I would like to get started sooner rather than later. Most importatnly, do they truly even help with learning kanji? like the barb radical in the word genius? That seems to have no correlation.
4 comments
> Most importatnly, do they truly even help with learning kanji?
As long as you know what they are and know a few dozen, I found that was enough. As in, if you’re at a point where you can recognize the difference between two kanji, you dont need to specifically learn about what kanji contain what radicals.
You dont even need to learn kanji, words are enough and, at least for me, the most effective way.
Someone else just [posted about this also](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/zxcg56/kanji_form/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), and the responses there might help you.
Radicals aren’t that important anymore. When there were only paper dictionaries, then the only way of organizing kanji and looking up a kanji character was by referencing one of a kanji’s components (called it’s ‘radical’). These days with electronic/online dictionaries it’s no longer a serious issue.
Learning radicals won’t hurt, but it’s not necessary and won’t really help much in learning kanji. Personally, I recommend you not bother with them unless you are particularly interested in them for some reason.
For interest, [here’s a list of radicals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_frequency).
They can be helpful to make mnemonics to remember the kanji.
For example there is many metals with the gold radical 金 like silver 銀iron 鉄lead 鉛, so not bad to remember what this radical is.