How do people memorise the Japanese Radicals for Kanji? - Feed Post by almost
How do people memorise the Japanese Radicals for Kanji?
posted by almost
Comments 7
The point of radicals is just to break down kanji and help make mnemonics you don't and wouldn't want to memorise the radicals because they're useless to know on their own.
I heard someone say that you should learn them to make it easier to learn full kanji- Radicals are amazing and you should definitely use them to help learn kanji but you don't need to memorize the radicals only use them. I used radicals to learn all of the jouyou kanji.
- To help further clarify, this is the "official" kanji radicals - http://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/ while the radicals have their own readings and meanings a lot of them are never actually used in japanese and learning them is pointless outside of a classroom. You want to use radicals as building blocks for harder kanji such as 洪
which you can break it down into your own radical parts (you dont need to use the "official" ones you can just make up your own if you want) ⺡+ ハ + ⼗ and you can throw them together to make up the kanji with a story of sorts a mnemonic. You can name the radicals what you want or use the given ones if you want to. So 洪 means flood so you can make up something with the radicals to help you remember that it means flood until it becomes natural that it just means flood to you. So lets say that ⼗ is ten, ハ is fins, and ⺡is ice. You can make up a story saying something like "If you take 10 fins and hit some ice you could cause a flood!" I just made this up now and there are much better examples but I didn't want to rip anyone elses story on here :P There are a lot of websites that are dedicated to using mnemonics and radicals to learn kanji in this sort of fashion. I mainly just want to convey that you want to learn the kanji and just use the radicals as a tool not something you "need" to learn. 
- @wigglysquire did you learn the radicals for kanji? I learned some of them from @Annick's (rank 6 on this site) notes and started doing good in the practice section.
- Yea, I learned the radicals as a part of the curriculum from Heisig's Remembering The Kanji (a book). That's the only method I'm familiar with as it worked for me and never had any reason to search elsewhere. I know quite a few people who don't like Heisig's method for learning kanji though. It's worth checking into if you haven't already. I finished Volumes 1 and 2. I plan starting the third book after I can pass JLPT N1.
