Do Japanese syllables have meanings similar to English?

7 comments

1. no. sometimes a particular kanji character is tied to the word it’s in, but also sometimes not. you can’t short circuit learning the words individually. you will find patterns, but you’ll find antipatterns, too. like those english ones you mention don’t work in unify or reify.

   fyi there’s a /r/learnjapanese but please read the wiki first before posting an “i just started where do i go” post that would get deleted

2. I think you are referring more to things like prefixes and suffixes.

   For instance, the syllables “un” and “re” don’t mean anything in English, but the prefixes do.

   Generally speaking there are some cases where this can be true, but I don’t think this approach will be very helpful to you.

3. Yes-ish but it’s best not to think they’ll with like that at all times. 無料 muryou free 無理 muri impossible. Both uses of ‘mu’ negate the meaning of the other symbol. Mu + fee = free, mu + logic = impossible. But it might not always work that way.

4. I think you will get very muddled trying to do that, because one syllable (sound) may be associated with different kanji & different meanings. What you do need to get to grips with are the particles, which are mostly one syllable each, & come after a word to indicate its use in the sentence (grammar) – approx equivalent to words like ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘to’ etc

5. You have to think of it more as letters vs words or parts of words.

   Hiragana/katakana is literally the Japanese alphabet. So just as the letter B doesn’t carry a “meaning” on its own, syllabic sounds like う/u or れ/re also do not “mean” anything.

   Where you can start to find some meaning is when you’re learning kanji, as the characters and radicals used to make those characters will often give you a clue as to how the word is pronounced and/or what kind of meaning it has. For example, kanji characters that contain the 言 radical (like 語 or 話 or 記) or words that contain those characters will have something to do with words or writing or language.

6. Not exactly. Japanese is not a romance language. It sounds like you’re looking for the puzzle piece approach to language.

   What you described before is prefixes and suffixes, which are usually derived from Latin and Greek origins.

   Japanese derived their kanji from Chinese and it functions differently.

7. Japanese does use prefixes and suffixes to make words from existing ones, but not EVERY syllable has its own intrinsic meaning.

   An example of a suffix might be 場 (jō or ba), which means “place”. You can get

   工場 (kōjō) (craft/construction place = factory)

   駐車場 (chūshajō) (park car place = parking lot)

   農場 (nōjō) (agriculture place = farm)

   売り場 (uriba, *not* urijō) (selling place = sales counter). This is a good example of “not all syllables have meaning”. 売り (uri) means selling. The kanji 売 means to sell, but when it has the Japanese reading (pronounced “u”), usually there are other syllables with it which are written in kana, not kanji. り, “ri”, doesn’t really have a specific meaning on its own.

   Also, there are words that can’t be deciphered from their kanji (famously, 馬鹿 (Baka), which is composed of the kanji for horse and deer, but means “idiot”), or aren’t even written in kanji. So, like u/Snoo-98592 and u/eruciform commented earlier, you can’t just understand words by dissecting them in to their individual kanji.

   You might like [this book](https://www.amazon.com/Instant-Vocabulary-Prefixes-Suffixes-Japanese/dp/0870119532/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Power+Japanese&qid=1650584041&s=books&sr=1-2), which explains lots of prefixes and suffixes.