So which is it damn it

Japanese Language Kanji
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It’s quite possible that I just haven’t been exposed to enough of the ‘native’ side of the Japanese lexicon. Everything I said is certainly useless when it comes to guessing kun’yomi of kanji, particularly when they’re used to refer to things that only exist in Japan and nowhere else. No amount of past experience is going to allow someone to guess that 七夕 is read たなばた, and with good reason: 七夕 is a character combination used in Chinese to refer to the same festival, but in China, and it’s almost certain that Japanese people celebrate the festival quite differently from Chinese people. Like I said, ultimately, experience is the most (and possibly only) reliable way to determine what readings are used.

With all due respect, I don’t stop at ‘fluency’ in the usual sense either. There’s a reason my criteria for declaring myself ‘fluent’ include ‘essays with proverbs and idioms’ and ‘reading… literature’: I have to be at least as good as a well-educated native speaker of my age, if not better. That’s my personal goal. As far as languages in general go, I’m quite an etymology nerd myself, though I don’t dig quite as deep in Japanese because it seems less common for dictionaries to break words down into root words and other units of meaning, which is common for European languages. However, that makes some sense since most Japanese words are much shorter than, say, complex terminology taken from Latin in English.

I simply felt that my position was being grossly misrepresented, and I was particularly riled up by the use of the words ‘dangerous’ and ‘this whole mess’. I mean, it’s true that the plethora of readings one kanji can have in Japanese is really quite shocking, even for a Chinese speaker, and I presume that’s what you were referring to as a ‘mess’, but in the heat of the moment, I felt as though I had been accused of contributing to the confusion, which was hardly my intention. Also, while it’s true that the vast majority of my exposure to Japanese has come from anime, the other things I read in Japanese include NHK news articles, dictionary definitions, and articles on Japanese usage, with studies from Japanese universities among them. Even if I might be overestimating the usefulness of my general rule (which I wouldn’t really call ‘golden’ in all honesty, since it’s riddled with exceptions), I still find that it’s been very applicable so far. Specifically, the more technical the language used, the more my general rule applies.

Finally, as far as ‘book-length replies’ go… I’m sorry about that. I probably could have been a little more succinct. At the same time though, even when I’m not upset about something, ‘book-length’ posts are standard fare for me on these forums: the more relevant evidence and explanation I can think of for a given topic, the longer my posts get. My replies on the ‘Short Grammar Questions’ thread are probably the longest in the entire thread. My past as a debater also means that I constantly anticipate possible questions and rebuttals, so I never stop shoring up my arguments and looking for holes I need to plug. It’s a habit. I mean, just look at this reply. I didn’t intend to write this much. Oh well. So yes, don’t take my reply length personally either. I acknowledge that your main point was valid, and that you raised good examples.

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And I wasn’t trying to imply you did, just trying to explain that my knowledge is somewhat lopsided towards theory and historical stuff rather than practical use.

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I see. That makes sense.

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Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

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Hey, no need to fan the flames

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Eh, it’s OK. I got angry and did my best to give a well-substantiated response. It seems OP appreciated it. Also, you read (at least part of) it, and gave me a respectful response, to which (I hope) I gave a sufficiently respectful reply. It was an interesting discussion that forced me to learn things, including the fact that 世 really can be used independently (something that used to be just a hunch for me), and the fact that 熟語 had two meanings (I knew how to write the word and understood its literal meaning, but had never delved into it). That’s enough for me. It was worth it, and there are (I hope) no hard feelings. This thread is full of fascinating examples of the sheer number of readings kanji can have, not least among them your example of 生, and I’m glad to have participated.

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Definitely no hard feelings here.

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To contribute something useful—

You said above that you were interested in the history of the language and in linguistics. You may want to check out A History of the Japanese Language, by Bjarke Frellesvig, which goes into great depth about how these writing and reading conventions developed. It’s an academic text with lots of weird phonetic notation but I’ve been able to figure out most of what it’s saying without an academic background in linguistics.

Also, separately, worth noting that on’yomi compounds are overrepresented on WK relative to their prevalence in the wild—which doesn’t invalidate your rule of thumb for kanji readings, but does fill out the picture a bit. The Wikipedia article on this is clear and well sourced.

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Thanks for the links.

I started skimming towards the end of the article when I reached the section on sound changes, and I eventually stopped altogether, because some of the sound changes mentioned were things I had surmised based on the differences I heard between Mandarin and other Chinese dialects: my parents and grandparents are all dialect speakers, so I learnt to convert between dialect pronunciation and Mandarin pronunciation in order to understand what was being said in conversations. I’ve tackled the topic myself in a response to a Chinese speaker on these forums starting Japanese. Similarly, many of the phenomena mentioned by the article with regard to Sino-Japanese words were things I was already familiar with or that I had guessed. I didn’t realise that the phenomenon of back-borrowing had taken place at such a great scale though. Then again, it isn’t really surprising since it’s common for less advanced societies to borrow words from neighbouring societies that are more advanced: Japan borrowed words from Ancient China, and modern China borrowed words from Japan after it advanced beyond China. The article is very comprehensive though.

This looks like a good book, and it seems it’s received high praise, if the quotes in review section of the summary are to be believed. I might look into it if I want a structured, broad discussion of the history of Japanese. For now though, I’ll be focusing on improving my ability to use and understand Japanese, and I intend to study 古語 once I’m sufficiently advanced so I’ll be able to interpret Japanese proverbs properly. Japanese students have to study Classical Japanese in school anyway, so I have to do that too if I want to be on par with native speakers. After all, as a Chinese speaker, I’m able to read some Classical Chinese because of its ubiquity in Chinese proverbs. First, however, I’ll need to be fluent enough to understand websites that deal with such topics, along with lessons on YouTube that deal with all the classical inflections and helper verbs, which are quite different from those in Modern Japanese. (That’s a hurdle that Chinese speakers learning Classical Chinese don’t have to face, because inflections and conjugation don’t exist in Chinese.) Till then, I’ll keep in mind the existence of this book in case I want an academic discussion of Japanese in English. Thanks again.

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It’s like the entire country of Japan, across it’s entire history, conspired together to create the most perfect troll ever.

Well played

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You kind of just get a feel for it after a while and can guess with pretty good accuracy whenever you encounter a new usage of a kanji that you’ve learned before. In general, the rules that I use are:

  1. Government or legal texts - Jukugo galore, almost everything is going to be onyomi. This is because back in the day, Chinese was the lingua franca. Even today, using more onyomi words has a feeling of being more “academic” and “smart-sounding.”
  2. Folk custom related or other traditional writing - Almost always kunyomi. Even any jukugos will be given kunyomi. They also typically hide pronunciations that would be covered by okurigana in the modern age. For example, yama-no-te is frequently written 山手 without the の.
  3. Names (people and places) - Onyomi is typically the exception. Vast majority of the time, you’re safe using kunyomi.
  4. There’s also a set of kanji that just have one pronunciation in major use. After you see it enough, you just kind of know that it’s only pronounced this one way.

My recommendation is just to learn the sounds of vocabulary words, independent of their kanji. Once you do that, you tie the sound to the meaning, rather than having to go through the characters used.

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Seems like no one mentioned in case of doubt you can simply paste the text to Google Translate. I can’t certify it is accurate, but I guess it knows :thinking:

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Browser extension with pop-up dictionary is even easier. Just highlight and bam, there it is. Look up rikaikun or rikaichamp depending on if you’re Chrome or Firefox. For words with multiple pronunciations, it even stars the most commonly used one.

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Fun fact: of the hundred most common surnames in Japanese, all of the ones that use pure on’yomi, and only those, have 藤 as the second kanji. For example, 佐藤, 伊藤, 加藤, 斉藤.

For the rest, you’ll be correct nine times out of ten if you use the kun’yomi, but sometimes there’s half-and-half on/kun names, and sometimes they use nanori instead, which are readings that are used only in names. Also, sometimes there’s invisible particles, as with your 山手 example - 木下 is きのした, 井上 is いのうえ, and so forth.

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First time? :joy:

Don’t worry, that’s kind of @Jonapedia’s thing. I’ve had 200 item review sessions that don’t last as long as his posts. :wink:

And that’s why this place is awesome. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: You guys rock :metal:

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