Have you ever had trouble figuring out what we’re talking about in WaniKani’s radical mnemonics? Take the 心 radical, for instance. You really want to be convinced by the mnemonic saying it looks like a heart, but deep down, you have doubts. “…How does this look like a heart?!”
We all perceive things differently, and sometimes the image we’re going for at WaniKani doesn’t make it through reliably via text. To help make sure that everybody is “seeing” the same thing in radical mnemonics, and to make the mnemonics more vivid and memorable, we’re working on images to illustrate our radical mnemonics. If you’ve ever seen Tofugu’s hiragana and katakana guides — it’ll be a lot like the artwork in those, but adapted for radicals instead.
For example, for the 心 radical, we’re planning to add an image like this:
We’ll also update the text mnemonic slightly, to make it fit better with the image:
Take a good look at this one. It kind of looks like a heart. Not the heart emoji kind, but a real-deal beating heart. Basically, there's a lump in the middle (the heart), and three lines that make up the arteries. Okay, so it's not the most anatomically correct heart, but just look at those floppy arteries going in and out, doing their thing and keeping you alive. What's not to love?
We hope that adding images like these will make it easier to connect the dots between the radical’s shape and the radical’s name, and help you to recall the radical’s name during the Lesson Quiz and those first couple Reviews, before the character itself begins to stick.
Some radical mnemonics also currently include slightly convoluted, non-visual associations, like the “private” in the 幺 radical “poop”. In these cases, artwork can help us draw a direct visual association between the shape and the name instead, making the radical name more memorable.
This is the current mnemonic for the 幺 radical “poop”:
There's something sticking out of you while you're in private. It's poop! You can't just poop in public, that's illegal and gross in this day and age. So the next time something starts to come out of you when you're in private, think, "Ah yes, it's poop.”
Now that we can include an image, we’re going to update the mnemonic to directly associate the 幺 radical and its name “poop” visually.
For better or worse, this looks enough like the poop emoji (💩) to make this the poop radical. Try to remember it for its distinct outline. If it helps you can also note the private radical on the bottom of this one, since you should probably be in private when you poop…
You see how we cut out the part about the "private" radical? This way, you won't have to make the extra leap from “private” to “poop”, which should save some precious time and headspace.
Our artist, Aya, and the WaniKani content team are creating the artwork and drafting any related tweaks to the mnemonics as we speak, but we didn’t want to wait until we’d finished them all before we start publishing. So we’re planning to release a handful of images each week, as Aya finalizes them. We’re starting this week with some radicals in Level 1, and will then keep going until most radicals have images. We might not be able to add images to all radicals, as some lend themselves more easily to artwork than others, but we’ll certainly do our best. There might also be some weeks when we’re not able to publish any images, but we’ll be trying to add some most weeks. We’ll keep a record of radicals that we’ve added at the bottom of this post.
We’ve had a lot of fun creating these images so far, and we hope you’ll have as much fun discovering them. And above all, we hope that they will help you remember the radicals more quickly and easily!