下げる（さげる）
下がる（さがる）
下り（くだり）
下りる（くだりる）
下りる（おりる）
下ろす（おろす）
下る（くだる）
All of these words have sort of similar meanings (to go down, to lower, to get down something, to get down yourself) and there are sooo many different readings. Anyone else find this kanji to be annoying?? And what have other people done to try to figure out the difference or do you just hope the context is enough to understand the meaning and then can figure out the correct meaning after that?
I hate 生 more to be honest.
Don’t forget though, studying on WK is pure isolation, when you start seeing similar words in the wild they’ll get more familiar.
くだり is the stem form of くだる, so if you count that in the list, then there are many more as well, but I wouldn’t since they just flow from the original word.
Also, I’m not sure where you saw くだりる, but if it does exist in some capacity, I think you can ignore it.
I mean, it’s not fun for beginners, but it’s also not illogical. Kanji with very basic meanings can map to many words with a variety of nuances.
Context (+ the helpful kana that come with the kanji, called okurigana) is almost always sufficient, and not only for 下. I don’t know all these words myself, but believe me…
生 has more readings (so it’s completely understandable to find it frustrating), and yet I know all the common ones purely based on context. (I even wrote a Tweet using all the ones I knew as a joke.) Once you’ve seen how the different 下 words are used, it’ll be easy. My personal pet peeve is when to read 開く as あく and when to read it as ひらく. I think I know the answer (most importantly, ひらく is usually more abstract), but I’m still not 100% sure. Still, it doesn’t usually give me any trouble when communicating in Japanese.
止める is another one for the list, either とめる or やめる and of course all of its variations.
these versions usually have a more abstract sense, stocks going down, lowering the volume, etc etc
These are more physical, and the point of them is the result of you being lower than before. For example getting off a vehicle, going to the lower floor, etc
This is also physical, but focuses on the lowering, so going down a mountain and so on
For these ones, no, although it is also important to be able to recognize conjugated forms. The meanings are a little different as well.
Yeah, I just found out that 止める has two readings and it’s so weird to me. They literally look like the same word in kanji.
What’s surprising is that やめる seems to be used more otfen than とめる as far as I can gather, but Wanikani only teaches とめる…
From my experience, neither is really that much more common than the other. And it’s not like you gain or lose anything if you don’t know both, because it’s such a common word, that you’ll almost certainly encounter it daily.
とめる with kanji is top 300 on jpdb. Maybe some of that is mis-parsing, but it’s not a rare word.
As for identical kanji readings, 退く comes to mind. That can be しりぞく, どく, のく, or ひく.
There are a bunch like that though, so it will get less weird to you.
EDIT: Maybe it’s just a coincidence, you never know, but when I searched for 止める on twitter, the 10 or so latest tweets all contained instances of とめる and not やめる.
I hate 日 way more than 生 tbh, everytime I think it takes the reading にち in a Jukogo, it ends up being じつ 
I have to get it wrong like 2 or 3 times before I can finally remember which reading is what lmao
Oh sweet summer child