which reading first?

3 comments

1. So, by “waste of time,” people generally mean that it makes more sense to learn different readings as you go by learning vocabulary words containing each character.

   For example, characters like 行 and 生 have several different readings depending on the word they’re in. Rather than learning all of the possible sounds up front, which is intimidating as you say, the idea is that you learn the words instead and work in reverse. This can be helpful for characters that have a lot of different readings but most of them are rarely, if ever, used in everyday words.

2. 2 readings eh? What if I told you that each kanji has it’s own number of readings. Maybe more than two, or as little as one.

   The readings come in two **categories**, onyomi and kunyomi.

   For example this kanji is one of the first you will learn: 上

   **Kun:** うえ、 -うえ、 うわ-、 かみ、 あ.げる、 -あ.げる、 あ.がる、 -あ.がる、 あ.がり、 -あ.がり、 のぼ.る、 のぼ.り、 のぼ.せる、 のぼ.す、 たてまつ.る

   **On:** ジョウ、 ショウ、 シャン

   Well just look at all those readings. Crazy right? And the great news is, it doesn’t matter much.

   Now why doesn’t it matter? You’ll see when you learn vocab.

   Each vocab is pronounced in a certain way and represented by a certain kanji

   Let’s learn a word: うえ which means “above; over; up​” and similar concepts like “top” etc

   It looks like this when you are writing it with kanji:

   上

   you just say うえ, don’t worry about other readings, because that word is うえ

3. neither

   kanji aren’t words, and their pronunciations are not independent of words

   just memorize words and their pronunciations and their kanji spellings

   over time there are some patterns you’ll find, and they correspond to readings, though there are also exceptions

   however, memorizing pronunciations is not useful on it’s own, it can only ever support memorizing and remembering words