# Kanji and vocabulary make no sense **URL:** \ **Category:** Tips & Tricks\ **Created:** [October 13, 2020, 5:44am UTC](https://community.wanikani.com/t/kanji-and-vocabulary-make-no-sense/46451 "2020-10-13T05:44:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 5
**Author:** ![Midnight\_Doragon](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/wanikanicommunity/user_avatar/community.wanikani.com/midnight_doragon/32/370606_2.png) [@Midnight\_Doragon](https://community.wanikani.com/u/Midnight_Doragon)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2020, 8:08am UTC](https://community.wanikani.com/t/kanji-and-vocabulary-make-no-sense/46451/5 "2020-10-13T08:08:00Z")
Building off what Leebo said, there was a great explaination that i think made a lot of sense as a place to start from, i’ll just dig back and find it… Okay i’ve found it: > [@An interesting explanation of why Japanese works the way it does](https://community.wanikani.com/t/an-interesting-explanation-of-why-japanese-works-the-way-it-does/45692/1): > > A friend of mine linked me to a comment on reddit which has a great take on the workings of on’yomi and kun’yomi, and how Japanese is based so heavily on meanings. > > > Imagine a world in which the word “financial” were spelled “$ial”, “monetary” were spelled “$ary”, and “money” were spelled “$”. So we’ve done two things here: we’ve mixed symbols and letters, and the symbols have different pronunciations depending on what word they’re in. > > Japanese is like that, except with a ton more symbols, and by the way there are no spaces between words. > > Another analogy: imagine if we had a symbol for water (I’ll steal from Chinese and say 水). Now you know how we have all these Greek and Latin roots? Let’s just use the same symbol for those, so we’ll write “hydrate” like “水ate” and “aquatic” like “水ic”. And “water” is spelled “水”. > > Japanese is actually a bit simpler than English here. In this hypothetical system for English, each character will get three classes of pronunciations: one for the Latin root, one for the Greek root, and one for the English word. This is because English steals from two foreign languages (Latin and Greek) to get its fancy roots. However, Japanese only steals from one language (Chinese) to get its fancy roots. So each character only gets two classes of pronunciations: Chinese and Japanese. > > **Final analogy: how do you pronounce 1cycle, 1rail, 1st, and 1?** There is a logic behind most of it, but it’s like in english words - it’s buried back in [history](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/onyomi-kunyomi/) and has changed with time, much like English, with it’s latin, greek, norman and germanic origins. You will become more used to it, and which reading applies when will become easier to guess, but ultimately it is a long process which will get easier with practice and exposure. Japanese is quite different from English, and indeed most languages, it has a very different way of communicating, and it’s normal for that to take some adjustign too. Keep pushing on, and the more you learn, keep finding small victories and looking at your goals for Japanese, find people to motivate you, and it will make it much easier. I hope that helped, even a little bit : ) Also since it’s your first time posting: \textcolor{MediumPurple}{\huge \textsf{Hi}} {\huge \textsf{@Giada92 }} \textcolor{MediumPurple}{\huge \textsf{!}} ![tenor](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/wanikanicommunity/original/4X/d/3/b/d3bc5ca0762ea5025c882e8f1fee4985f687727b.gif) It’s great to have you here! If you haven’t already check out the [Forum Guidelines](https://community.wanikani.com/t/welcome-to-the-wanikani-community/8) and the [Wanikani User Guide](https://knowledge.wanikani.com/). There’s also tonnes of things on the forums to help you on your way such as [The guide](https://community.wanikani.com/t/my-journey-of-368-days-the-ultimate-guide-for-wk/31318/2), [The Ultimate resource list](https://community.wanikani.com/t/the-ultimate-additional-japanese-resources-list/16859), and [API and Third Party Apps](https://community.wanikani.com/t/the-new-and-improved-list-of-api-and-third-party-apps/7694). If you have any questions, check out [this thread](https://community.wanikani.com/t/new-people-questions-3-lost-confused-were-here-to-help/16421); but if this doesn’t answer your questions, feel free to create a thread like you’re done here, or email [The Wanikani staff](mailto:hello@wanikani.com). Good luck, and I look forward to seeing you around! --- _[View the full topic](https://community.wanikani.com/t/kanji-and-vocabulary-make-no-sense/46451)._