Learning the radicals is one of the most useful things you can do when learning kanji. With just knowing the radicals, you can sometimes at least know what a ka

Learning the radicals is one of the most useful things you can do when learning kanji. With just knowing the radicals, you can sometimes at least know what a kanji represents, even if you've never seen the kanji. For instance, if a kanji has a fish radical in it, it's very likely a kanji for a fish. If there's a clam radical, it could be a clam, or related to money. If there's an animal radical, it's very likely an animal kanji. Similarly, knowing the individual kanji and readings helps learning combination words, and guess at how to read them, when can be helpful sometimes when a word is written in kanji, when it's usually not. You know the word, and one of the kanji in the word and can use the radicals to guess the readings and know the meanings and realize the word.