So I’m fairly new to learning Japanese, and I’m kinda confused about Kanji. My native language is English, and I’m fairly compatent in Chinese. Kanji just confuses me.
Starting off, why does Kanji have multiple syllables? In Chinese, every character is one syllable, but it seems Kanji characters can have up to three syllabes. For example, water is 水, and its only 1 syllable in Chinese (for one character) but 2 in Japanese, why is that?
It also seems that one Kanji character can be read in multiple ways, so how exactly do I know how to read them?
Thx, I don’t know if this has been asked, but I’ve been searching for an hour and can’t find anything.
4 comments
> Starting off, why does Kanji have multiple syllables?
It has everything you can possibly imagine. But yeah, sometimes it has multiple and sometimes just one.
Kanji was applied to Japanese in various ways over the centuries leaving us with something rather inconsistent.
> It also seems that one Kanji character can be read in multiple ways, so how exactly do I know how to read them?
Ah, this is a question everyone will ask. Basically, in English, the letters (take ‘e’ for instance) have all different kinds of pronunciations right? But the word they are in chooses how the letters sound.
Similar to how letters are used in English, in Japanese, the kanji have multiple readings, but he vocab word only sounds one way, and that tells you what reading to use.
When Japan loaned Chinese characters, not only did they used them to write Chinese words, but they also adopted them to write native Japanese words such as *mìzú*. The native Japanese reading of a Kanji is called 訓読み Kun’yomi. Since Japanese is not Chinese, native words are allowed to be longer than one syllable.
When loaning Chinese characters, Japanese also loaned their associated reading. These readings are called 音読み On’yomi. Since Chinese isn’t Japanese, when trying to reading Chinese, some syllables maybe hard for a native Japanese speaker which can lead to them making adjustments to better pronounce them. For instance, the Japanese had trouble pronouncing final *-k*, so words such as 木 where loaned as もく *mókù* by adding the final *-u*
Japanese also loaned Chinese readings multiple times, which means that any given Kanji has more than one *On’yomi*. Usually a Kanji would use its Kan’on reading though some use the others. When which reading is used really cones down to just memorising it.
As for distinguishing Kun’yomi and On’yomi, in general, when a Kanji appears alone, it is usually Kun’yomi. When it occurs in a compound, it is usually On’yomi. However, there are of course plenty of exceptions so it really does come down to memorisation and associating the appropriate reading with each vocab term
The [Tofugu guide to onyomi and kunyomi](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/onyomi-kunyomi/) should be what you’re looking for.
Basically, Japan had its own language long before it adopted the Chinese writing system. Water was “mizu,” road was “michi,” etc.
When Buddhist monks brought kanji to Japan, they also brought the Chinese pronounciations with them, and they taught everyone to use those. _But_ — the monks themselves were Korean, using Korean pronounciation, and the Japanese language’s sound set is completely different from Chinese. So the end result – the “onyomi” readings – is basically twice-mangled Chinese. With these, water is “sui,” road is “dou,” etc.
But.
Japanese people still had their normal, everyday language. They still called water “mizu” when they weren’t doing religious or academic things. So they sometimes used the Chinese characters, but the Japanese words. These became the “kunyomi” readings.
In modern Japanese, each kanji usually has at least one onyomi reading and one kunyomi reading. You can often tell which reading to use based on the word it’s part of, but not always; many of them you have to memorize based on knowing the entire word. The Tofugu article goes into that in detail.
by the way did you do a search on this subreddit? because this question is one of the most commonly asked topics
[https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/search/?q=read%20kanji](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/search/?q=read%20kanji)