So I was just doing my Wanikani review and made the following mistake:
For 宝くじ (lottery), I wrote ほうくじ instead of たからくじ.
I know that what I wrote is incorrect, and I’m not suggesting that I could be lazy and just interchangably mix kun’yomi and on’yomi and expect to always be understood, but I’m just curious as to how understandable mistakes like this are?
This is probably very contextual, as some errors will be more confusing than others. I’m also aware that ほう can mean a lot of different things beyond ‘treasure’ (where the word lottery derives its meaning from in Japanese).
Also, a Japanese speaker will have it ingrained in them that たからくじ means lottery, and they’d never hear someone say ほうくじ. However, there are some mistakes in English which, while incorrect, are still totally understandable, so I’m wondering if this is somewhat the case in Japanese too in these cases.
This is really just out of curiosity, I’m interested in what native/fluent speakers have to say about this! Thanks!
13 comments
Do NOT as for a glass of おすい
Can’t speak for natives, but if in conversation you refer to a ほうくじ without me knowing it’s specifically about a lottery, I wouldn’t know what you’re talking about.
Sometime they will sometime they wont. I don’t think japanese are really into kun/on yomi. They learn letter after knowing the language and match kanji to what they know. A good example about this mixing is 満月 which means full moon. It reads まんげつ but if you mistake and read まんつき your counterpart will probably understand. For ほうくじ it is less easy to understand as it is less common word but still くじ is not very frequent neither ほうく so they may figure out the mistake even if they didn’t really think kun/on but they know that those readings exist.
They could probably figure it out if you only made one spelling mistake, and they had the inclination or time to bother. Try using real words whenever possible though.
It’s going to depend on the specific mistake. Think of it in terms of English analogs: if you say two-cycle instead of bicycle, people will probably be able to figure it out, at least with proper context. If you say equise instead of horse (swapping the equi- from equine with the hor- from horse) then no one is going to understand you.
Yeah. People make jokes about this in Japanese all the time
I once said ちょうしょくまえ instead of あさめしまえ 朝飯前. The native obviously understood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDKYLWdyFSE
With context and time to think, the occasional mix up would be understandable but not if it’s happening on a regular basis
For the most part, no. It’s like saying a different word and expecting people to understand it. If I said “warm canine” and meant “hot dog” it would probably take you a while to figure out what I meant.
It depends. If you said おかけわ instead of ぼうけん for the word 冒険, no one would know what you were talking about.
However there are a lot of words/prefixes/parts of words that tend to be joined with other words, and when that happens, they switch between pronunciations. For those words, a Japanese speaker might recognize that you’re messing up and using the wrong pronunciation.
For example, if you said ごつ to mean “five” in a sentence like, 五つのリンゴをかった, a Japanese speaker might pause a second and be like, ごつ？あ、いつつだね！ or something like that.
By and large no, you’ll not be understood.
There are a few words which can take either on-on or kun-kun readings, but those are the exception, and you still cannot mix and match readings however you please.
This is a unique example and personally the fact that its written 宝くじ and not 宝籤 enables such confusion.
籤 itself is an uncommon hyojigai, with uncommon onyomi. While words with purely kanji are often onyomi only, the implication from the lack of onyomi of that 2nd kanji is that 宝籤 is purely kunyomi.
Writing it this way 宝くじ opens the possibility that its a mixed 重箱 pronunciation, which you’re interpreting as such.
I mean, TL;DR answer is that it’s not the word.
It would be like asking for a glass of “hydro” instead of “water” in English. The root of the word is the same, but it’s literally not what anyone calls “water”, so it wouldn’t be immediately understood and the native speaker would probably shake their head a few times before thinking “oh, he wants water.”
Japanese people don’t “think in kanji”, they think in words. When you say something, they’re not analyzing kun-yomi or on-yomi, they’re reacting naturally to whether what you said is a word that they know or not. If you say something that isn’t a word, especially if your pronunciation or intonation is a bit off, they’re going to be confused, even if there’s a reading connection or something.
So, as a last resort, it’s not the end of the world if you make that mistake, but no — ほうくじ isn’t a Japanese word and won’t be immediately recognized as native Japanese.