Hi everyone. So while WaniKani has been very helpful in teaching me mnemonics and kanji (I’m at the Beginner level), sometimes I see some things…some explanations of certain Kanji, and I am just so confused…
So for example, take the kanji for Mountain. On this very site, it shows that there’s only ONE possible reading for that Mountain kanji, and that the reading is ‘san’. (I WAS previously familiar with the fact that Mt. Fuji is sometimes referred to as ‘Fuji-san’, so from that POV, this all makes sense to me.
However… I also know that for the family/surname of ‘Yamaguchi’, that it contains the kanji for Mountain + the kanji for Mouth. Yamaguchi >> a family who came from/lived by the mouth/entrance to a particular mountain.
So what has me stumped is… how is it that the ONLY possible reading (‘pronunciation’?) for the Mountain kanji is ‘san’ (and that ‘Yama’ is not another Possible reading of that same kanji)? Why is the family name of ‘Yamaguchi’ not ‘Sanguchi’ instead?
If the word for ‘mountain’ is ‘yama’ in Japanese, why isn’t ‘yama’ shown as a possible reading for the kanji for ‘mountain’??
Then there’s the kanji for Mouth (which I know as ‘guchi’). Yet, this site shows that the only Reading (pronunciation) is ‘kou’. So where does the ‘guchi’ come into play? When I tried to enter ‘guchi’ as the reading, the WaniKani site didn’t even suggest that ‘guchi’ COULD be correct, but that they were looking for a different reading. It simply suggested that my entry of ‘guchi’ was 100% wrong. Very confusing, why the site did this…
Also, if you enter やま as a reading when being quizzed, you won’t be marked as wrong. Rather, the screen will shake and tell you something like “That’s also correct, but we’re looking for a different reading.”
This is part of their teaching strategy. When you are taught a word that uses さん as the reading for 山, they won’t provide an additional mnemonic for it, because you’ve already learned it when learning the kanji.
However, when a different reading is used, they will provide an additional mnemonic or explanation, as it is an exception to the rule that you have learned.
In the specific case of 山, you’ll see it pop up three times:
As a radical, with a blue background. This is because 山 can be used as a component in other kanji, such as 島 or 崎.
As a kanji, with a pink background. Here, you learn the reading さん, which will then appear in a number of the words you encounter late on, such as 沢山 and 山脈.
(It will also sometimes appear as ざん, due to something called rendaku. If you don’t know what that is yet, don’t worry; it’s something you pick up as you go along.)
As a word, with a purple background. Here, you are taught that when this kanji appears as its own word, it is read as やま.
Thank you for the explanation. I think that was not made readily clear to me. I couldn’t understand why, when I was being tested on the kanji for ‘mountain’, it was only showing ‘san’ as a possible reading. It was not showing ‘yama’ anywhere in my review/quiz, as yet another possible and correct reading for that kanji.
In addition to the great response you already got, if you want to read more about those different reading I recommend this article: Onyomi vs. Kunyomi: What's the Difference?
There’s already been good answers regarding what you’ve asked, but I wanted to chime in with some additional information for other kanji you might encounter:
In addition to kanji that have both an on’yomi (typically for compound words) reading and a kun’yomi (typically for solo words, or words with hiragana attached) reading, you’ll also see:
Kanji that have multiple readings of both categories. WK will teach what it thinks is the most common one, though it will usually accept or use a warning for the others if you accidentally use that. It also will teach some of the other readings, if they’re common, through vocabulary that uses them and just let you know it’s not using the one you learned.
Vocabularly that uses multiple kanji and the readings have nothing at all to do with the underlying kanji’s readings. Some of the common ones are taught in WK and for that you just have to memorize the reading for the vocab as a whole.
That’s why it’s important to pay just as much attention to the vocabulary cards you unlock. They’ll both reinforce the reading you learned and teach you the other common readings you didn’t learn by brute force. You can think of the reading you learned with the kanji as the “educated guess” for when you’re reading a physical book and you’re trying to figure out what the reading might be to look it up in a dictionary.
Edit:
Also adding that names are very prone to not following patterns. They’re all over the place. You’ll even find names that are pronounced differently while using literally the same kanji. It’s crazy.
Thank you. Yes, I did know that Fuji is never referred to as ‘Fujiyama’. I guess I was talking more from the English-speaker sense…that when I am referring to Mt. Fuji with my English-speaking friends (and who also speak Japanese) that I will refer to it as either ‘Mt Fuji’ or else ‘Fuji-san’. My confusion was stemming more from the fact that I know the Yamaguchi surname/family name originates from families who lived by a ‘mountain’ (yama), but that that same kanji can also = ‘san’.
