I’m working through WaniKani to try to learn some Kanji as every time I’ve attempted to learn Japanese before I’ve totally ignored it, and after going to Japan I realized how useful it would be for traveling.
I’ve been enjoying it so far, but I’m becoming frustrated out of my mind at the different readings. It feels like half the Kanji have the reading of what they are called, then the reading when combined with Hiragana, but actually when used in a word its never any of these. It’s like every Kanji I have to remember 9 different ways to pronounce it with no real indication of which I would ever be using.
I have no idea how I’d begin to keep all these readings and memorizations in my head for thousands of Kanji. I think this is mostly just a vent, but maybe I’m missing something that makes keeping this all straight in my head easier.
EDIT: I appreciate the advice from everyone. I want to also point out WaniKani is not just blindly learning Kanji, I am learning some Vocab and also starting the Genki 1 book as well to get more Vocab.
10 comments
I think you should learn vocabulary (not kanji).
Learn vocabulary, not kanji. When you see a new kanji, you should also study several common words with the kanji in it and how it is pronounced.
This is why I like the Kanji! app. It gives you 1-3 of the most common readings of the Kanji, and then the English translation. That way you familiarize yourself with the Kanji enough to then jump into memorizing vocabulary. There really isn’t any benefit I’ve found to learning a dozen readings of a single Kanji in isolation, it’s better to learn the various readings through vocabulary words.
You’re not supposed to memorize every single reading in isolation for each kanji. WaniKani teaches you the single most common one when it teaches the kanji, but after that, you’re meant to learn them in the context of each vocabulary word. That’s why the vocab sections of WaniKani take so much longer than the kanji sections.
Think of letters of the alphabet – when we teach kids the letter C, we say the “see” sound out loud, but it can also make the hard “k” sound or other sounds depending on context. We remember the letter by one possible sound it makes, but there are lots of others.
Think of the first common reading as the “guess” reading – if you see the kanji in the wild and you don’t know the vocab word yet, that’s the sound you should guess. But as you learn more vocab, you’ll get a better feel for what to guess when.
With learning the Kanji, I find is really helpful. Gives you a way to connect the dots when learning new words. But, my advise is don’t memorize every onyomi reading, pick one and that one will be your base. From there, you’ll naturally learn the other readings when it’s used in words. It’s better to learn a word and how it’s pronounced than to learn the various ways a kanji could be pronounced.
Does this ultimately mean you can confuse readings in different or new words? Yes. Is it frustrating that there isn’t just 1 way for consistency? Yes. And this is when you remember, language is made by people. People are flawed and don’t do things perfectly logically. It’ll take time but you’ll have to accept that this is just part of the difficulty of learning a new language. Can’t fix this problem, will have to accept it for what it is.
> the reading of what they are called, then the reading when combined with Hiragana, but actually when used in a word its never any of these
This seems like you have done misconceptions about how readings work. There are onyomi and kunyomi, and both can sometimes have okurigana (i.e. kana that fulfill grammatical functions or disambiguate different words written with the same character), although most the time okurigana are used with kunyomi (and I think technically only kana used with native Japanese words count as okurigana, but in practice there are also instances of them being used with onyomi). Every character can have any number of combinations of these, not just “the reading” from each of those categories
> It’s like every Kanji I have to remember 9 different ways to pronounce it
Very few kanji (no idea about exact numbers, but probably <300) have more than 3-4 readings (that actually matter, many readings are exclusive to like 1-2 words or not used at all in practice), and generally the rarer the character is the fewer readings it’ll have. Many only have one, and most only two, maybe three
> no real indication of which I would ever be using
There are many indications, but you need to be familiar with lots of characters and how they are used in order to develop an intuition for that, so like everyone says, learn words, not isolated kanji
> It’s like every Kanji I have to remember 9 different ways to pronounce it with no real indication of which I would ever be using.
Untrue. Context (i.e. the surrounding characters) will (almost) always narrow your options down to a single possibility. As others already told you, learn actual *words* that are spelled with your target kanji, rather than the kanji itself in isolation.
Also a parallel that was already drawn, but the English alphabet is similar. Most letters (or clusters of letters; most infamously “ough”) have many different ways they can be pronounced (multiple possible “readings”). Yet when encountered as part of an actual word, you don’t have to roll a dice and pray you get the pronunciation right; you know exactly how to pronounce the “u” in “umbrella”, and you’d never mistakenly read it as it’s read in, say, “unique”.
Likewise, 生 is read:
– い.きる when used to write the verb 生きる “to live”
– う.まれる when used to write the verb 生まれる “to be born”
– せい in compound words like 先生{せん・せい} “teacher” (among [other related meanings](https://jisho.org/word/%E5%85%88%E7%94%9F)) or 学生{がく・せい} “student”
– しょう in compound words like 一生{いっ・しょう} ~”lifetime” >!or 誕生日{たん・じょう・び} “birthday” (though [rendaku](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/rendaku/) comes into play here)!<
– etc.
**Edit:** And the vast majority of kanji don’t even come *close* to having 9 possible readings. As with any language, it’s only the incredibly common, basic stuff that’s filled with exceptions and irregularities (such as 生 and 下). Think how irregular the verb “to be” is in English (am/are/is, was/were, been), and compare it to something like “to laugh” (laugh/laugh/laughs, laughed, laughed).
There’s an option so Onyomi are always in katakana with Wanikani. It doesn’t solve the issue completely but that helped me.
learn vocab, not kanji. kanji aren’t words. as you learn words, the patterns in them will start to merge and overlap and make learning new words easier, eventually.
another important point is that never at any point, ever, do you “read kanji”. you never, ever look at a kanji character and decide what yomi to pronounce. ever. can’t stress this enough. you look at words and pronounce the words. each word has a pronunciation and a meaning and a kanji spelling, but it may or may not line up with your expectations.
however, just shoving a bunch of kunyomi and onyomi down your throat would be like rote memorizing all the latin and greek words that have roots in english before even trying to learn english. i mean you could, but damn that would be painful. sounds like that’s the pain you have right now, so just let go of the rote yomi memorization and take it easy on yourself and focus on vocab.
by the way this is super common. too many learning programs don’t explain this. or if people learn without any direction, this is a big wall that people run into.
I’m still in the early stages of learning myself. At the moment I can probably recognize around maybe 200-300 kanji but I definitely don’t know all the pronunciations.
To be hoenst, it’s not an easy thing to learn, and it’s the number 1 thing that makes Japanese difficul tfor an English speaking person.
But there’s ones thing I can hopefully help you with, because it happened to me. One day you will be studying and the penny will drop. All of a sudden it just makes sense. It happened to me and there was nothign that really set it off. I just started looking at things and said, oh yeah I can see and understand why this is now. I have no doubt you will have this moment too. Just don’t get frustrated. It will come!