Oh man, for me it was the counters, but I know your pain so well. Even though the kanji gets more abstract (and certainly more complex) over time, I’m not sure if I’ve found anything as hard as the beginning on Wanikani. Being the simple, common words, the exceptions in readings are so excessive there.
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Well this is good to know! I read a post somewhere and the person said level 10 was when it started becoming more fun overall, so I’m hoping that my brain is more attuned to Japanese study at some point soon!
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You know, I never much struggled with this, except my brain keeps insisting “poststamp” is a word. I have no idea why. I just added it as a synonym 
*coughs in 生 and its 11 different readings*
It makes sense. The most-used things are the most likely to acquire some natural variance over the course of a language’s development.
All in all I’m actually impressed there isn’t more of that in Japanese.
Especially with verbs actually… the only two irregular verbs (other than ある being ない in its negative form) being 来る and する kinda blows my mind.
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Oh PLEASE don’t get that in my brain now 
HAHAHA! YESSSS!
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I feel you 
Most difficulties I seem to have with 手. Usually it sais something like “Use kunyomi because of body parts”.
上手 and 投手: "Well, about that…"
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One thing to note with those 11 readings though: they’re not all worth learning individually. 生 may have 11 readings but most of those you’ll pick up naturally with vocab. As long as you know the most common readings for any given kanji, you’re good.
For 生 specifically I’d almost go as far as to say that if you know セイ, ショウ and なま, maybe い and う, you’re good. The rest you’ll pick up.
Ah! Yeah, I get the confusion, but the kun’yomi thing is only when actually referring to body parts.
上手 and 投手 don’t refer to body parts, so they don’t follow that guideline. You see the same with 足 in words like 不足. 手首 and 足首 on the other hand use the kun’yomi for both of their kanji because the word itself refers to a body part.
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Well, if you put it that way it makes more sense.
Then I’ll only have to look out for exceptions like our beloved 切手
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Never thought i’d see pokespe quoted as a reading option. Pretty funny as its one of my special interests for years lol
As for readings: honestly to me I went on the brute force method: just kept reading and writing words i got wrong so they’d stick. If a song featured it, I’d listen and associate with it. Don’t know if that’d help you though lol
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Yeah, it is unfortunately only a rule of thumb, not much of an actual rule…
Though for words like 投手 and 運転手 the giveaway is it refers to a person’s occupation, and in that context from what I’ve seen 手 takes しゅ as its reading.
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Good to know! Any reason you used katakana for せい and しょう??
Yes this catches me up too!
definitely bookmarking this post 
切手! CURSE THEM ALL! 
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They’re the on’yomi - basically meaning the readings borrowed from Chinese (being a foreign language - hence katakana).
It’s something you’ll see in some dictionaries/resources as well. Some don’t even separate the kun’yomi and on’yomi at all, and just write the on’yomi in katakana.
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This I did not know. I knew on’yomi was the borrowed Chinese, but I just assumed since it was a regular part of Japanese vocabulary it would be hiragana unless it was a name or a word only in Chinese!
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Katakana serve a lot of purposes, really. Loanwords are a common use for them, but this is another one. And sometimes you’ll see them used for emphasis as well. Some people even choose to write their name in katakana as a stylistic choice, in some contexts.
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When writing it without kanji (let’s say I want to say a word where two kanji have their onyomi readings but I don’t know the kanji, so I just write the reading, or I want to put the little furigana above it because it’s not a common word), you’d still write it with hiragana. The katakana/hiragana differentiation is a dictionary/learning one, but not often present in actual day-to-day sentences. Just wanted to say this one in case it got mixed up
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You will however see a kanji replaced by katakana on occasion, though I think that’s mostly in a colloquial context (words like ダメ are often written in katakana for instance).
In essence it’s probably best to not worry too much about a difference between hiragana and katakana. The use of katakana can convey something but doesn’t always convey anything - not even word boundaries. On the internet you’re likely to run into things like ヤバい which is one word but uses a mixture of katakana and hiragana. Think of them as bold letters or italics. There’s just a convention to use them for loanwords - but it’s also valid to write loanwords in hiragana, though it’s not very common.
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Yeah, which is why I went for “not often” vs “never” just in case. sometimes people love to do a bit of stylization as you said. Can’t blame them tho katakana look sleek as hell
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I see! This I will also take not of.
By the way, how do you put the fuigana above? The chrome extension keyboard I switch to probably doesn’t have that function…
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Once upon a time, when Japanese comics were translated into English, the pages would be mirrored. This meant that the book could be read left-to-right as a Western audience expects. For those of us in the United States, it also meant cars were driven on the right side of the road (rather than the left). But also a lot of right-handed characters became left-handed.
There was a shift at one point to not mirror Japanese comics when translated into English, so now they read right-to-left. Because first-time readers might be unaware of this, some English-released manga put a disclaimer as the “first” page if you start reading it from the way you would expect an English comic to be.
The most common counters it seems never get furigana, even in books for little children. Thus I forgot them after burning them in WaniKani, and don’t know them because they don’t have furigana to remind me when I’m reading comics.
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I wasn’t paying attention to the context, but if you want to put furigana on something in the forums ruby tags are the way I’m familiar with.
船だ
大統領
<ruby>船<rt>ふね</rt></ruby>
<ruby>大統領<rt>だいとうりょう</rt></ruby>
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