Hi everyone. While I’ve been able to learn more kanji over the past few weeks (I’m currently at the guru level), it’s also starting to get a bit more complicated. Obviously. Especially between the on’yomi vs kun’yomi readings (which one they want, and ‘when’), and the kanji vs vocabulary readings. What also makes it hard is that sometimes the vocabulary reading for a particular kanji will look/sound nothing like the kanji reading.
When it comes to kanji readings vs vocabulary readings (for any particular kanji), I’m trying to wrap my head around this, so that it ‘makes sense’ in my brain…not in a super literal way, but just in a general sense…
From the perspective of people who are familiar with the Roman alphabet, COULD I look at the readings for kanji almost like how we pronounce (‘read’) the various letters of the Roman alphabet? In other words, take the letter ‘H’, and how we normally say/read ‘H’, as a standalone letter. It sounds/reads nothing like how that letter would actually be pronounced/read, and when it is part of an actual word. And yet, those of us familiar with the Roman alphabet have never thought “wow, why do we pronounce the letter ‘H’ so differently from how it’s pronounced when part of a word?” And in fact, the pronunciation of many of the letters in the Roman alphabet - as standalone letters - sound quite different, once they are incorporated into actual words.
And while ‘yes’, I know that the concept of kanji is different from ‘letters’…that kanji - in and of themselves - represent things/ideas (whereas letters of the alphabet do not), would you say that what I say above could be a good way for me to think about kanji, particularly vis-a-vis Kanji readings vs Vocabulary readings (and the fact that they can be so different sounding)?
That’s not too bad of a comparison. I think a better comparison is numbers, like if you think of how “2” is pronounced differently in 2, 2nd, 20.
Like, if someone asked you how to pronounce 2, you might answer “two,” and then you’d probably look at them funny if they said twond instead of second, because obviously that’s not how that’s said. But, both 2 and 2nd have the meaning of 2-ness about them.
Yeah, I guess your numbers analogy DOES make more sense. Thanks for that!
Funny that you mention numbers, as I’ve often thought the same. Whenever I hear folks say how challenging it can be, learning how to count things in Japanese, I just stop to consider how we do this in English/in the U.S. ‘Two’ sounds nothing like ‘twice’ or ‘second’. ‘One’ sounds nothing like ‘first’. And just think of all the ways we count/categorize things as slices, pieces, spoonfuls, dozens, layers, etc.
But yeah, with regards to my original question, I think as you say, thinking of how we pronounce numbers, whether as standalone numbers, vs ordinal numbers etc., is the more appropriate analogy.
The following analogy (completely made up) helped me better understand why there are multiple different readings for a single character: Imagine that English was written with kanji.
Imagine there is a character 水 which is read “water” when it is a word by itself. It has a well defined meaning and can stand alone. It is likely that the word “water” existed as a spoken word, before people learned to read and write. It has been assigned the character 水.
Now there a words that have come from another language into this English.
For example there are words coming from Latin. They are usually written with multiple concatenated characters but 水 is one of them. But here the character is read as “aqua”. Like in “aquaculture” or “aquarium”. It still has the meaning of water.
But there are other words, also containing the character 水. But they were imported from Greek during a different time period. They are written the same way, but the reading in this case is “hydro” like in “hydrostatic”, “hydrophobic” or “hydrogen”. Again, still carrying the water meaning.
Those compound words with imported readings are more “sophisticated”, “technical” or “scientific”. But there are also some compound words that use the standalone reading “water” as well, like “watermelon” or “waterproof”. Those are more common, everyday words.
This difference between “water”, “aqua-”, and “hydro-” is like the difference between the readings みず (=water) and すい (corresponds to aqua or hydro in this example, there’s no third reading in this case) for 水.
Like in western languages, that use latin or greek syllables, the compound words using On readings (kanji readings in WK) are often more formal than their counterparts that only use Kun (= originally japanese) readings.
I’m not sure this analogy really works, because the way we pronounce the letter “H” as a standalone letter is never how we pronounce it within a word. In contrast, the “kanji readings” WK teaches you will all be used as part of the way some words are pronounced. (That’s why they are readings in the first place. WK picks one common one for each character that it calls “the kanji reading”, but that’s just what they think will help you with learning – really kanji can have multiple readings, usually one on- and one kun-, but sometimes more and occasionally less.)
The analogy @phnorowk makes with basic English words and latin and greek word parts is closer to how the different readings of kanji work, I think.
Correct. But considering where I am in the kanji learning process, right now, so many of the kanji Readings that I’m learning (and often it’s two totally different readings…kun’yomi and on’yomi)) …their readings/pronunciations are not an exactly perfect part of the kanji Vocabulary that I’m learning…vocabulary which the particular kanji may be a part of…
From what I understand, that is pretty much what actually happened. There was no Japanese script, before Chinese traders brought their script along and was adapted by the Japanese. They could have stuck with their Japanese words, but decided to adapt the Chinese readings as well. Probably made communication with their number one trading partner easier.
Mmm, but that doesn’t mean that an analogy “this reading is just arbitrary and not how it’s used in a word” is going to be a good guide to a system where the reality is “this reading will be used in a lot of words, I just haven’t met them yet”.
The reading confusion is worst for the early WK levels, I think, because the early kanji are the common ones which are the most likely to have multiple different readings, and you have the fewest building blocks (known kanji) to be able to construct multi kanji words which use the on-yomi. Both these things will get better, and you’ll get a feel for the system over time, I hope.
The other important thing to remember is that what you’re ultimately aiming to learn is vocabulary readings and meanings – when you see a complete word on the page, you want to know how to say it and what it means. For individual kanji, it doesn’t really matter if you know a meaning and reading or not – except to the extent it helps you learn the vocab meanings and readings. The WK system asserts that it is helpful in the long term to take the intermediate step of learning a “meaning” and “reading” for each kanji on its own. But you’re never going to need to be able to list off all the possible readings for a kanji in isolation or define its meaning.
It is my understanding (from what I’ve read online) that in modern standard Chinese (standard Mandarin) most characters tend to have only one reading where Japanese usually has multiple On readings. And I believe many of those were imported during different time periods or from different regions in China which had different pronunciations. (Maybe even other languages like Cantonese?) So this is kind of like the difference between Latin and Greek words in English.
These are just my assumptions from stuff I’ve read online. I don’t know if this is actually correct.
Especially between the on’yomi vs kun’yomi readings (which one they want, and ‘when’), and the kanji vs vocabulary readings. What also makes it hard is that sometimes the vocabulary reading for a particular kanji will look/sound nothing like the kanji reading.