This really helped me a lot! I read it while I pooped behind the refrigerator! Thanks this helped a lot Reply. Does that mean that we have to learn onyomi AND kunyomi?
When you start learning Japanese, you first learn hiragana, and then you learn katakana,…. Submit a Comment Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Our Partners. Want to learn Japanese on the go?
Download our podcast to get all of our episodes featuring free Japanese lessons, news, and entertainment! So if you want to easily read Japanese you'll need to know them both. Here are some examples of kanji where both readings are commonly used:. Note: Sometimes you'll see on'yomi readings written in katakana or English, and kun'yomi readings written in hiragana. This is a dictionary-only method used for differentiation.
We won't be using them here. Multiply this by pretty much every other kanji. Sure, some kanji will have one reading that is way more useful than the others, but for the most part, there will be an on'yomi and kun'yomi reading worth learning. I'm going to leave it at that for now, so we can look beyond "one on'yomi and one kun'yomi," because, unfortunately, kanji readings are not that simple.
Although most kanji have both an on'yomi and kun'yomi reading, there are exceptions. There are kanji that only have one or the other. Remember these language transitions were happening way back in history and Japan was not yet the unified group of islands we know today. They were fractured, unrelated groups with unique leaders and systems of government that happened to live together on a couple of big islands. Not only did they enjoy fighting among themselves, they also did not have the Internet.
On the flip side, there are also kanji characters that only have kun'yomi readings because they are kanji created in Japan. So, you can't always assume a kanji will have two readings: an on'yomi and a kun'yomi. Sometimes it's just one of them, for the reasons listed above. That makes it simpler for you, the kanji learner! Now that you know about Chinese and Japanese readings, everything should be cake right? Well, not exactly. Let's take a step back.
We know kanji came over from China via Korea, but history spans a long, long time. And if you know anything about Chinese history or if you've played Dynasty Warriors , you know that the seat of power in China was pretty much constantly changing hands. As an outsider, you probably think of these kingdoms as a bunch of "Chinese" people fighting each other while speaking the same "Chinese" language.
China is big, there are many groups, many cultures, and — most importantly for this article — many languages. These language shifts had a direct effect on the types of Chinese language that were brought to Japan.
And not every kanji was brought over at the same time or from the same place. The character and the concept stayed the same, but for some reason Japan thought it would be neat to just adopt both Chinese readings for the same kanji. Can you guess which reading arrived in Japan later? Hint: it's the reading used with subway systems. In pretty much every case, these characters and their readings were brought over by scholars of Buddhism and Confucianism in the form of religious and historical texts usually through scrolls.
Japanese scholars would then copy and adapt those texts into their own writing. The majority of the on'yomi readings we use today are from the Kan-on group, though you'd never know it by looking at a dictionary. In fact, most dictionaries make no mention of the origins of the on'yomi readings and simply list them all without any differentiation. If you ever see these three kanji in a dictionary or resource, now you know what they're talking about!
Let's take a look at examples of kanji with multiple on'yomi readings, which, as you know now, are just readings from different Chinese language eras. You can probably guess why: because they are the most recent additions to the Japanese language. I can almost guarantee you'll never be asked about which on'yomi reading is from when or where, but knowing why there are multiple readings can help alleviate the overall confusion that comes with learning kanji.
Just because kun'yomi readings originated in Japan, you may start out thinking there is only one kun'yomi per kanji, but it isn't that simple. There can be multiple kun'yomi readings for one kanji, just like there can be multiple on'yomi readings, but the reasons are slightly different.
In Japan, before there was writing, spoken language still existed and words for similar concepts would be said different ways. Related Pages Japanese Hiragana. Japanese Katakana. Japanese Kanji. Hope this helps, Kia Leng. Average Rating. Click here to add your own comments. Join in and write your own page! It's easy to do. All Rights Reserved. How to determine onyomi and kunyomi of each kanji character?
Rating Reading by: Anonymous I agree I started learning Kanji through memorization and became overwhelmed very quickly. Once I decided to just start reading using Kanji dictionaries for words I didn't know I was amazed at how quickly I started recognizing words.
Read Japanese blogs, websites, find Japanese friends on FB, anything you can do to get ever-changing reading material in front of you. You will be amazed at how quickly this enhances your ability to read and recognize one of the biggest obstacles in learning Japanese That way, you're seeing the word while you're hearing a native speaker say the word.
Tremendous help! From my own experience, I realized that my kanji knowledge impoved after learning Japanese for few years. It's not so obvious in the beginning and you always feel like you keep forgeting the kanji you've learned. And that's when people started to quit when they see no improvement. Perseverance pays. Rating dito by: CayeAuriga Same here, reading is more important than to know a therm.
Right know I am at the time where I have to fill gaps in sentences to fully read and understand. First I began to know the vocabulary then the grammar.
Rating Linguistic explanation. Rating Reading by: Anonymous Make sure you have a basic grasp of of the grammar and vocabulary before focusing on kanji. I tried learning kanji at the beginning of my Japanese studies and it was hard because I was trying write words and concepts that I hadn't really learned before. After studying Japanese for awhile, learning kanji became much easier because I was learning to write kanji for words I had already memorized.
Also, by that time, I recognized quite a few kanji and that made things easier too. Rating Thank you by: Alex L-L I've been studying japanese for about 2 years and 9 months now, however i had the stupid idea of trying to simply learn all my kanjis by words I was searching for a way to understand onyomi and kunyomi and i think i got it here. I hope it will help and shall bookmark this place to be sure to remember it afterward.
Rating relieved for the enlightenment by: Anonymous Domo arigato sensei. And there is a great extension you can install for Chrome called "Yomichan" that's really helpful for learning alongside Anki. Then you come across another weird word with that kanji which is read a completely different way. In some cases, a kanji can have more than seven readings. Are they regional dialects? Are they situation-dependent?
Are you missing some important detail? How do you know which readings to use and when? Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere.
Click here to get a copy. Rather, kanji is believed to have made its way to Japan from China sometime between the fifth and eighth centuries AD.
And, on another note, the katakana and hiragana writing systems arose in the ninth century AD.
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