Could someone explain to me the difference between a kanji reading and kanji vocabulary reading in simple terms please?

4 comments

1. WaniKani is really, really bad about this. They flat out make up meanings of radicals to fit their mnemonic system, and they focus too much on individual readings of individual kanji.

   Kanji are symbols that represent multiple sounds. Don’t bother learning kanji in isolation. Focus on vocabulary that contains that kanji. Through learning vocabulary, you will automatically learn most associated readings.

2. This is a Wanikani issue more than a Japanese language one

   They have decided to label one or two certain readings of a kanji as the “kanji reading” as in the way the kanji is pronounced as part of a complex word Vs a “vocabulary reading” meaning the reading of the kanji taken as a single word

   Basically they would call the “Jo” reading of 女 and call it the “kanji reading” while calling the “onna” reading the “vocabulary reading” because that’s what you would pronounce 女 as a word. I think this just confuses the simple difference between kun’yomi and on’yomi readings unnecessarily.

3. kanji don’t have pronunciations, words do

   yomi are a set of historical pronunciations of chunks of words across time that represent all the possible ways to say the chunk of a word that line up with a kanji character, and represent either the japanese interpretation of the chinese word chunk during the century in which the word or character came over (onyomi), or the japanese native word chunk as it was pronounced at the time a chinese character was associated with it during the century in which it came over (kunyomi)

   and none of that is particularly helpful a lot of the time. it’s like trying to learn all the latin and greek root words behind english and then putting together english using it – it’s just not how english is read

   just learn words. you’ll find that there are finite pronunciation patterns in the kanji that go into them (tho there are lots of exceptions, too). but you can’t read kanji, and you never pronounce kanji individually

   each word has a pronunciation, a spelling (that may include kanji or not), a definition, and a usage. focus on those

4. It’s wanikani’s way of using onyomi and Kunyomi