Hi all. I am lucky enough to be visiting Japan for a bit and loving putting my (very) limited knowledge into some (very) minor use. One thing I find interesting is just how varied the readings are of kanji used in place names. One example where I know all the kanji but would never have guessed the reading: 北大路 - Kitaōji. It’s a new reading of 路 for me and kun’yomi for the first two. If you’re more competent (or native) can you usually guess the reading just from the kanji or do you have to learn each new place? Anyone gone hard on learning geography as part of their learning journey?
Not that this doesn’t also happen in English with place names - some can be pretty counterintuitive to pronounce too.
PS I’m LOVING the visit. It’s been a loooong time since I came and planning this trip was what originally prompted the thought about learning some 日本語.
Oh, nice. Tell us about your trip. Where are you going? What are you doing?
じ is a kun’yomi for 路. And you’ll see it popping up a few times, like 上野広小路 on the Tokyo Metro Ginza line.
I want to say that generally place names are kun’yomi more often than not, but I admit I’ve never done a scientific study. Notable exceptions that immediately spring to mind include Tokyo and Kyoto.
(And 生 has an absolutely disgusting number of different readings when it appears in place names, mostly from words getting slurred together over time.)
Not hard hard, but I did produce this spreadsheet a while ago, which was more focused on the kanji themselves and what level of WaniKani you learn them at rather than the readings, but it does include the readings. Albeit not the type of readings.
Also for a bit of fun practice, you can message the Kotoba bot on Discord, who will run quizzes for you - decks include, among other things, a place names deck with over a hundred and eighty thousand items, and one with all eight and a half thousand train stations. Or either of those divided up by prefecture. If the bot has been invited to a server somewhere, you can also compete with other users on the server.
That is a wild spreadsheet - impressive! I can barely scratch the surface looking through them all from my phone. Not something I will be tackling any time soon…
From my single example and perfect positioning on the Dunning-Kruger curve I will overconfidently agree with you.
Ha - Worcester was coming to my mind when I wrote that but that’s a good list. Transatlantic friends adding syllables to Edinburgh always makes me chuckle too.
The “usual” for first timers - we’re about halfway through the golden route. Both my wife and I have been to Japan before but in very different contexts and we haven’t been together so wanted to see the highlights. We both absolutely loved Tokyo - honestly just roaming the city was so much fun. Great food, beautiful design (fashion, architecture, parks/gardens, restaurants, everything!) and as Londoners it felt a weird combo of somehow very familiar and very different at the same time.
We finish back in Tokyo again so I’m probably going to go and buy too much from Kinokuniya* that I can aspire to one day be able to read/study with.
*I did pop into a book off at one point and oh wow was that a confusing experience. It was also a sweaty one- somehow 10 degrees warmer in there than outside.
Out of curiosity, I decided to do a study. I took a random sampling of a hundred trains stations from my spreadsheet and worked out which reading was used for each kanji in each name. (Google says this sample size should give me 95% confidence and a 10% margin for error, whatever those mean. Also, I used Excel’s RAND() function for the random sampling, so I guess it’s only pseudo-random.)
Results:
40 stations use pure kun’yomi
9 stations use pure on’yomi
the remaining 51 are some mixture of both, and sometimes nanori, or some other unusual reading
However! A lot of station names use prefixes to distinguish them from other stations of the same name. Sometimes it’s the prefix 新, meaning “new”, which generally always uses on’yomi (unless it’s actually part of the station’s name, like in 新潟). Sometimes it’s the name of the former province that used to exist in the area, and those are usually on’yomi too. Sometimes station names contain actual words like 空港 or 温泉 which typically use on’yomi too. And then there’s suffixes like 町, which, as @Leebo pointed out, could easily be either. So if I ignore prefixes and suffixes, the stats become:
58 pure kun
15 pure on
27 some mixture
So there you have it. My initial assertion was correct.
But yeah, with enough exposure to place names, you start to get a feel for it. For example, 谷 is typically (though not always) read as や in place names (which, today I learnt, is a nanori reading) - for example 四ツ谷 or 市ヶ谷. As prefixes, 上 and 下 are read as かみ and しも respectively - examples are 上熊本 or 下北沢 - and the greater majority of station names that start with those kanji use those readings (the trick is to recognise when they’re not prefixes, as in 上野 or 下呂, or are part of province-name prefixes like 上越 or 上総). There’s many unwritten rules like this, and as I said, you’ll get the hang of them over time.
Yeah, you get a feel for most places after awhile. BUT. The thing that always makes me laugh is there are a lot of places that don’t actually USE them readings of the Kanji. They’ve had their name for a long time and at some point in their history they decide they wanted to use kanji… and they absolutely just pick kanji with nice meanings to represent their town/city/area and those ones… you just need to learn them as 例外 most places you can read though on the actual readings.
Often times when I tell someone that is a little 飾り気 or 威張っている to make themselves feel good, that I know most of the readings… theyll pull out place names that don’t acutally use the readings of the kanji and it just makes me sigh and say, “Firstly, this does no devaluate that I know most of the readings as I said most, secondly these city names you are showing me are exceptionalities in that the kanji were chosen for meaning and not to match the name.”
Don’t think that’s an example. こう is a kun’yomi for 神, while へ is a nanori for 戸.
(That said, that one is a fun example of something anyway, because depending on exactly which 神戸 you’re talking about, it can also be read as かんべ, ごうど, しんご, かんど or かのと.)
Theres a few places near me. Give me some time. I need to look them back up. I am stupidly busy these days. I have my recertification exams to remain an underpaid teacher in about two weeks and than 6 weeks and im desperately trying to lose weight so.. Im basically studying japanese 2-3 hours a day. Studying for recertification 2-3 horus a day and working out 2-3 hours a day.
