Holistic Japanese Learning Advice Thread

[Jonapedia]

@Tschumi

i’m worried that might lock my thread or something and prevent others from benefitting from it.

Just for future reference, it won’t, don’t worry. I’ve seen threads run for thousands of posts after an answer was chosen. But yeah, by all means leave that ‘answer’ spot vacant. It might encourage more people to share information, and you or someone else might find it helpful.

@Tschumi

Thanks for triyng to help with pink vs. purple. i think i’ll get it sooner or later, but i love your suggestion about the lengths of words - actually it was recently pointed out to me that chinese pronunciations are usually monosyllabic and, being a onetime mandarin speaker, i do kinda see that logic in that and it is helping me something…

The irony of it all is that I literally meant it just for matching the colours to their meanings, not kanji readings. Glad that worked out somehow. Hahaha. However, yeah, when you’re differentiating on’yomi from kun’yomi, reading length is a factor. I went looking for some of my past answers on this, and I think this is the most complete one:

@Jonapedia

@Panamapeet

When learning kanji through Wanikani, do you actively remember which reading is the onyomi reading, and which reading is the kunyomi reading?

I’m a Chinese speaker, so I guess I can’t really not pay attention when a reading sounds like its cousin in Mandarin or other Chinese dialects. However, I don’t think that knowing which reading is which is useful per se beyond increased general knowledge: I’m pretty sure that before the modern Japanese education system, there were relatively uneducated but otherwise fluent Japanese people who went around without worrying too much about whether they were using an on’yomi or kun’yomi. However, if you use the classification as a means of helping you figure out how to read a kanji, then it has value. When you get a feel for it, you might say, ‘OK, this seems like more of a kun’yomi situation. I’ll use the kun’yomi,’ and reach for it in your memory. That’s the point of knowing which is which, in my opinion.

I guess I’ll just try to give you a few ideas about how to tell when you’re looking at an on’yomi. These are just general rules, and I’m pretty sure there are exceptions. Here goes:

• Most on’yomi are two syllables (the technical term is ‘morae’, since you could see that すう is one syllable, but two morae) long. A few are one syllable long, but those are a bit rarer. In any case, they’re never longer than two syllables, in my experience. (N.B.: using my terminology, ちょう = two syllables. Cho - u. In real life, of course, you just say ‘choo’ with an extended O sound.)
• Many on’yomi contain sounds that used to be non-existent in Japanese. Apparently the ちし + ゃゅょ system was invented for transcribing Chinese sounds.
• On’yomi often end with fairly hard consonant sounds. く and つ turn up quite a lot, as does ん. You still hear sounds like this in Chinese dialects today, like in Hokkien, Cantonese and Teochew. The one consonantal ending that turns up in Chinese dialects that doesn’t seem to pop up in Japanese is P: I still haven’t seen an on’yomi ending in ぷ.

I don’t think a kun/on classification is going to match the vocabulary/kanji classification perfectly, but maybe it’ll still be helpful.

Either way, all the very best, really. I hope you start to see improvement soon.