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When you think about how you read English text, or text in any language really, you don't decompose all that much during normal reading. For example, if you loo

When you think about how you read English text, or text in any language really, you don't decompose all that much during normal reading. For example, if you look at the word "house", you don't read it like "H-O-U-S-E-house" like a child learning to read would, because you have learned to recognize "house" immediately. But even then, it's still useful to learn how the different bits and pieces of language fit together (etymology, root words, and such) in order to parse new words that you encounter for the first time. Even if you have never encountered the word "quizzacious" before, you can see the root word "quiz" and can make an educated guess about its meaning.

fenomas 4y ago
That's true for English roots, but for the WK radical names we're talking about here, many of them are just arbitrarily chosen words. E.g. they call 歹 "yakuza" and 各 "kiss", etc. There's not necessarily any connection between the mnemonic words and the radicals they represent. (And even for the remaining cases, a kanji's radicals don't generally tell you much about the character's meaning the way English roots do. At least not outside of a few cases, like 言 or 魚, which don't need to be memorized because the radicals are already basic kanji.)