人 Is there any rule to readings? Also a question about same readings

Hey, so i’m currently struggling with 人 kanji. Wanikani first starts off teaching us on’yomi readings of にん, じん and then when vocabulary is introduced they teach us kun’yomi ひと

A lot of words on level 1 vocabulary is using 人 and they seem to use various readings, for example level 1 vocabulary include:
人口 (じん reading)
三人 (にん reading)
二人 (exception reading)
人 (standalone read as ひと)

So i kind of got bombarded with a lot of ways to read 人, was wondering if there’s any rule to it whatsoever?

Also with 人口 and 人工 both read as じんこう i started to wonder, is there a lot of vocab that have the same reading? And if that’s the case, how do people distinguish which word did the person speaking intend to use, do they need to look at each sentence through prism of context and figure that out? Sounds pretty hard.

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There are rules for when 人 is a suffix. Nationalities じん, counting people にん, person who does an action にん.

This does not include times where it just happens to be the second kanji in a normal kanji compounds. It’s just those situations as a suffix where there are rules.

The other times between じん and にん are determined by when the word was imported from Chinese into Japanese. So you need to come up with a different way to remember them, or just rely on exposure to solidify it.

As for homonyms… It’s the same in any language.

Bank

Was I talking about a place where you keep money? Or the side of a river? Without context it’s a meaningless question.

As for 人工 and 人口, they are different parts of speech, so it’s even less likely they’d be mixed up.

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They’re both nouns… aren’t they?

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Well, 人工 is “noun and の adjective”, not “noun” like 人口, but the の adjective usage or directly attaching as part of a longer compound is far more common than just being used as a noun in my experience. That is, using it like “artificial” rather than “artificiality.” Is that not your experience?

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Not sure that I could particularly say that I’ve experienced either of those words all that much.

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Hello Alphz604x, as a fellow beginner I feel your struggle. It can feel a bit infuriating when you type in the wrong one. Again. There are lots of readings for ‘day’ as well and I get them muddled up too. But I think the struggle you feel in your brain is the feeling that happens as you get them cemented. I’ve found that eventually my conscious brain got fed up of getting them wrong (I’m thinking the readings for 1 person, 2 people, 3 people) and then my unconscious started stepping in, whispering - “It’s this. Just type this.” - and it turns out it’s right, and so somewhere along the line, you’ve absorbed it. But the struggle is probably necessary?

I’m not saying that looking for patterns and being logical about things isn’t a good idea. But I think other things go on under the surface, with all the SRS repetition. So don’t worry too much about getting it wrong. Writing your own good mnemonics does help of course. But getting it wrong actually helps too, because it focuses the mind on these tricky ones. In my experience so far at least :slight_smile: Hope that’s supportive!

https://community.wanikani.com/t/how-to-correctly-answer-compound-words-with-%E4%BA%BA/47547/9?u=cringe

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