I've recently started learning kanji and idk whether i should learn radicals or not. I know some radicals are kanji on their own like ー(one) but should i learn radicals that aren't stand-alone separately first and then study kanji or jump straight to learning kanji and spot the radicals as i go?
Radicals used to be important, because that was the only way to look up kanji in a paper dictionary. Now they are mostly trivia. I wouldn’t bother learning them unless you need to know them to pass a test or something.
Yes, radicals are less important now with handy electronic dictionaries. However, there's often a connection between the main radical and the meaning of the kanji.
For example, ごんべん is all about saying things:
計=plan
訓=instruction
詩=poetry
話=talk
語=language
説=opinion
読=read
談=discuss
謝=apologize
While ひ/ひへん is all about fire:
灯=light
灰=ashes
炉=furnace
炊=cook
炎=flame
焼=bake
煙=smoke
燃=burn
爆=bomb
Admittedly, some aren't this direct like 煩=trouble, which originally meant 'having a fever and headache' and evolved over time, with the 'fire' representing the fever.
But I think knowing about radicals makes it easier to recognize these commonalities and helps connect new kanji you encounter to some pre-existing knowledge.
That being said, there's no need to memorize all of them. Just be conscious of them.
I didn’t mean to imply that kanji radicals are useless. After all, I’m studying them, and if DimiK sticks with Japanese long enough, eventually they’ll want to study them too. It’s just that radicals are a lot less useful now than they were before in the bad old days, and it certainly isn’t the case that mastering the radicals is a prerequisite to learning kanji.
My reaction may have been overstated because I’ve found radical study to be so frustrating. There are a lot well-behaved characters like the ones in gdartflow’s examples, with a semantic radical on the left and a phonetic complement on the right, but there are so many exceptions. Sometimes a component seems to have been randomly chosen to be the radical. Sometimes, the radical disappears when a character is simplified.
My worry is that a new learner will find all this more confusing than helpful and give up before making much headway.
You can definitely learn kanji without studying radicals.
I've never bothered to learn the official "radicals". However, I do break kanji down into component "parts". These "parts", for the most part, correspond to entire kanji, or radicals. Sometimes those parts carry meanings and sounds with them. Other times they don't (or at least they don't seem to). After learning a bunch of kanji, it becomes more apparent which parts consistently carry their meaning and/or sound. This helps me when I try to remember the kanji and learn new kanji.
It is my opinion (some will disagree, and your results may vary), that the official radicals, do not usually correspond with the parts that I feel are the best representatives for the meaning or the sound of the kanji. As far as looking up kanji in my paper dictionary, while it does have radical indexes, it has other ways to look up kanji too that don't require radicals, which I find more convenient.
