Why does 仕組み have the み at the end?

[brett7davis]

For this vocab 仕組み… 仕 uses its on’yomi reading, and 組 uses its kun’yomi reading

組 has the kunyomi reading: くみ

Why does the vocab have み at the end if the reading is しくみ instead of しくみみ ?

[simias]

Short answer: because okurigana is a bit of a mess.

Slightly longer answer:

Practically speaking, you would expect 組 to be using the kunyomi, being a lone kanji. However 仕組 looks like it could be a jukugo word, a word that would be read with the onyomi of the individual kanji (something like しそ in this case). Having okurigana makes it obvious that it’s not the case.

Another factor is that くみ comes from the verb 組む, so arguably 組 is the one that’s “spelled wrong” here, because you would expect it to be spelled 組み in the same way that 読み (reading, from 読む) has the み sticking out.

For these very common words there’s usually a well established spelling that “everybody” uses, even if it doesn’t really seem to follow the usual rules of okurigana, and you just have to familiarize yourself with it.

As you progress you’ll encounter more and more of these words where the spelling is basically at the discretion of the author. Is the verb “to rust” 錆びつく、錆び付く or 錆付く? Up to you, really. 立入禁止 can be spelled 立ち入り禁止. 立場 is never 立ち場 however.

What I would advise in this case is to identify the root, the verb くむ and notice that くみ and しくみ derive directly from it. One issue with the grammar-agnostic approach of Wanikani is that you don’t really get a good understanding of how some of these readings link together, you’re just asked to rote memorize them. You would never guess the reading to be しくみみ if you knew the underlying grammar at play.

Amusingly I had almost the exact same question regarding the reading of 合図 a few years ago:

合図 reading mnemonic

The level 14 合図 reading mnemonic states that I already know the kunyomi of 合 but in fact in previous levels only the あ reading is taught in 合う. The same this happens at the same level for 具合 and 試合. Meanwhile, still at level 14, 場合 does give the “eye” mnemonic, but of course you’re not guaranteed to get that word first. Since 場合 only contains kanji introduced in previous levels (8 and 12 respectively) maybe it was meant to be included in level 12 or 13 instead? Not getting a mnemonic for a n…

And @Leebo points out that this confusion mainly stems from a misunderstanding of Japanese morphology, basically:

@Leebo

@simias

I guess but the fact that there’s no okurigana doesn’t make the additional い reading intuitive at all, at least to me.

Japanese people would definitely be a bit puzzled by the confusion, since stem forms are quite common as potential kunyomi readings for kanji (meaning, they’d think if someone knows 合う, it would be natural for them to try あい as a reading), but it just shows that WK’s method only takes us so far.

With 3 years of hindsight, I agree with this assessment.