When I look things up on Jisho, sometimes I see stuff like for example た.すin the list of readings for 足. I don’t understand what the . in between hiragana represents, can anyone clarify?
Also, sometimes I watch youtube vids in Japanese with subtitles. This morning at the end of one subtitle was a pair of (), inside of which was what looked like a giant upside-down capital letter A. I’ve seen this now in a few places.
I googled (well, duckduckwent) madly, and all I got was:
Translations, how to say “upside-down letter A” in Japanese
Cheesy website links offering to generate upside-down letters
This was amusing but unhelpful. Can someone enlighten me?
I believe it’s just to show that the Kun’yomi reading they’re showing is before the period - when the Kun’yomi is part of a verb, what comes after the period isn’t actually part of the Kun’yomi reading, but is just the okurigana showing the end of the verb
“た.す” means that 足す is pronounced たす. Each kanji has different pronounciations, depending on context. Words can be made up of a single kanji, several kanji together, or kanji and hiragana/katakana. If you see a reading with a dot that means anything before the dot is the reading of the kanji, if it’s written with the hiragana after the dot.
eg:
行: い.く means that 行くis pronounced いく
遊: あそ.ぶ means that 遊ぶ is pronounced あそぶ