WaniKani shows the reading of 空く as あく, but Jisho shows it as すく. I’m confused — which one is correct?
Link for wanikani: Wanikani reading for 空く
Link for Jisho: Jisho reading for 空く
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Both, with each having a slightly different meaning.
https://hinative.com/questions/1741444
あく refers to something being empty, すく refers to something being “relatively” empty, but still having something there.
すく is used in situations like being hungry - お腹が空いた (おなかがすいた) or a train not being very busy, あく is used in situations like saying a glass is empty, or a seat has nobody sitting in it.
You can see the meanings for あく here on Jisho Jisho.org: Japanese Dictionary
under the (esp. 空く) tags.
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Ah, I see! Thank you so much. But I’m a bit puzzled as to why the reading すく always appears first when searching in dictionaries, while WaniKani doesn’t explain this reading
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WK doesn’t handle words that use the same kanji but have multiple meanings and readings very well. Since すく and あく have different meanings, it wouldn’t make sense to accept あく for ‘to be hungry’ and so forth. The WK team has said that they haven’t figured out a way to include words like this in the system, so I guess they just choose whichever one they prefer.
The one that really annoys me is 額 which WK insists on teaching as ‘framed picture.’ I see it constantly in novels as ひたい/forehead and I’ve yet to see it as がく/framed picture.
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This is slightly speculative, but I think the answer here is:
- WWJDIC has a single entry with multiple senses for 開く/ 空く/ 明く with reading あく meaning “to be open / to be empty” (which it then clarifies by noting which senses tend to use which kanji). It lists 開く first in the heading because that’s by far the most common kanji of the three to use over all the senses.
- 空く with reading すく gets its own entry (because it has a different reading and its own specific sense, “to be less crowded, more empty”). There aren’t any other kanji that are used with this word, only 空.
- When electronic dictionaries return hits for a search like 空く, they don’t list them in some sort of “most important” priority order, they use the computerized kanji equivalent of alphabetical order, which is to sort them by their Unicode encoding number. It happens that 空 is 0x7a7a in that ordering and 開 is 0x958b, so the entry that starts 空 appears before the one that starts with a 開
In summary, the fact that “空く 【すく】” is displayed before “開く[P]; 空く[P]; 明く 【あく】” doesn’t mean anything about which is more common, or more important.
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Thank you so much for the detailed explanation — it really helped me understand things much better! Did know any dictionary apps or tools that also include information about word frequency or how commonly a word is used?
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Using yomitan with the jpdb frequency dictionary installed is probably your best bet. You can also have displayed results sort by frequency
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For cases like this one where both items are written the same way I would be cautious about jpdb’s frequency ordering, though. Generally the input texts will not have had furigana, so which one gets counted will be “what did the parsing algorithm pick”, and it definitely makes mistakes.
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