Should I learn whether a reading is kunyomi or onyomi

When I memories a kanji reading I just memories all of them and don’t care about whether they are onyomi or kunyomi is this gonna cause problems later….cause for now I don’t see much problem and seems to work our

by Academic-Trainer5727

7 comments
  1. No. It would be good to notice whether something is on’yomi or kun’yomi, but learning them right away is not a high priority. That’s why more advanced people tell beginners not to even bother memorizing any readings out of context.

    To put this into perspective, Japanese children start learning the difference in third grade. By that time, they would have seen the word 先生 quite a few times, and yet they would never think to read it as さきセイ, センなま, or some other nonsense because those aren’t how that word is said. The word is せんせい and is written as 先生 in kanji, as far as they are concerned.

  2. On the app I use the kunyomi is in hiragana and onyomi in katakana, so if you’re a visual learner I find this to be helpful.
    However I’m just a beginner so I don’t think I can answer your question of how important it is to know which reading it is, imo it doesn’t really matter as long as you know which reading to use in which words.

  3. You just learn words in context, that’s all. If you read manga, they have furigana on them so you get exposed to different readings of the same words too where appropriate.

  4. It sounds like you are just memorizing kanji readings with no context, and that’s going to be overwhelming later, plus it won’t teach you how to naturally know whether to read a kanji with onyomi or kunyomi. 

  5. Basically, and this is just a generalization, onyomi is used when multiple kanji are used, and kunyomi is not. As a rule of thumb, when 2+ kanji are together, they’re read using onyomi.

    To use an English comparison, we have the word “water” but also hydro- and aqua-. “Water” is like kunyomi when talking about the “thing itself” (I want to drink water), but in other situations, aqua-/hydro- are used. You could technically say “at home have a ‘water receptacle’ and an ‘earth receptacle”, but the words people actually use are “aqua-rium” and “terra-rium”, or that “I’m feeling ‘without water’” but you’d probably say “de-hydr-ated”.

    If you get the onyomi and kunyomi mixed up, it’s like if you’re feeling sick and ask for a “heat meter” instead of a “thermo-meter” since “heat” is the kunyomi and “thermo” is onyomi.

    This mainly just applies to speaking and reading aloud, and perhaps not as much if you’re exclusively using Japanese for reading only where it doesn’t matter if 水熱 (technically 熱水 but using an “English” example) is water-heat, aqua-heat, hydro-heat, water-thermal, aqua-thermal, or **hydro-thermal**.

  6. No, and you shouldn’t be memorizing “readings” of kanji either. Japanese does not consist of kanji readings, it consists of words.

  7. I wouln’t learn a reading outside of a word, it’s a waste of resources.

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