Ok, my title might not be entirely clear, so let me clarify what I am talking about.
You see, recently I have wanted to make a document where I would list all of the on’yomi and kun’yomi readings, ordering them by the number of times they are used in the 2135 most common kanji. My hope was not only to find out what readings are most frequently used (so I can put more emphasis on those), but also to have a clearer picture of which of the readings I need better mnemonics/word associations for (like “cake” for “kei”). I want to personalize some of them as the ones suggested by WK don’t always work for me.
With all of that being said, after a lot of research online I was finally able to find a link to a document listing all on’yomi readings for kanji. The list even has them ranked by how many kanji use each reading and what those kanji are. The problem is that I can’t seem to find the equivalent for kun’yomi readings. So, I was curious if anyone knew if someone ever went through the trouble of doing the same thing for kun’yomi readings?
Yea, my guess was that since kun’yomi readings are less frequently used, no one really bothered doing it. Although, I’m surprised something like this wasn’t officially done in a book.
I wouldn’t agree with that. Kun’yomi is used just as frequently as on’yomi, if not more so. Granted, those big honking multi-kanji words like 文部科学省 tend to be pure on’yomi, but almost all common-use verbs are kun’yomi.
Not exactly a rigorous study, but for a data point from actual Japanese media, I grabbed my copy of Flying Witch volume 13 (because it happened to be in arm’s length) and counted kanji readings. Ignoring character names, the first ten pages contained 108 kanji using kun’yomi, and 116 using on’yomi. And yes, the on’yomi won out here, but by just 6.9% - if I’d gone another page, the balance could have easily tipped the other way.
No, I think the issue is more that there’s just so much more variety in possible kun’yomi readings for kanji that a list of the most common ones wouldn’t really be all that informative.
It sounds like you’re referring to frequency by dictionary entry? (Sorry if you mentioned that specifically).
In that sense, yes, on’yomi are more frequent. But it’s also not really a metric that most people worry about, since there tends to be a lot of obscure words that fill up dictionary entries with on’yomi usage, but the one or two kun’yomi will show up in actual texts way more often.
