I just had a tought that once I’ve learned the JouYou Kanji I might be able to predict the meaning of words on my own
Here’s what I mean. I tried to guess what “voice” means and figured it might start with “on (音)”, looked it up and it was “onsei (音声)”. I might have guessed it correctly if I knew the second Kanji.
Do such things actually happen or am I wrong?
8 comments
IMO, definitely possible to make educated guesses once you have enough of knowledge. Not just language but other fields in general like physics, chemistry or whatever. Once you mastered the fundamentals, you can make assumptions which are not 100% all the time, but it can be absolutely helpful.
It depends on the situation, but this is sometimes possible depending on the word, but in my experience is pretty difficult.
It is important if you expect to do this to have a strong understanding of the many meanings of the kanji. For example; 十分 meaning adequate, includes the two kanji 十, meaning ten, and 分 meaning part, or portion.
Together it might not be obvious, but if you also know that the 十 kanji is also commonly used to convey completeness, particularly as a radical in other kanji, then the meaning “part” and “completeness” combine to mean “completeness of a part” – so “adequate” now makes sense in that context.
>Do such things actually happen or am I wrong?
It absolutely does but you need to know an enormous amount of words, not just kanji. There’s a lot of logic (both concerning semantics and pronunciation) which can’t be understood by learning kanji in separation. Also, rare words tend to have much more straightforward meanings and thus are easier to guess.
You’ll be able to recognise the meaning of words intuitively in context by learning Japanese along with kanji same as you recognise the meaning of words in English by understanding the roots of a word. You might never have seen the verb ‘vocalise’, but if you know a number of related words you immediately know what it means.
yes this happens all the time
but guessing what it means and guessing how to say it are different things, guessing how to actually read is harder (or in some cases you can’t really know)
I mean, this is how many Chinese people are able to pass N1 after just a year or so of study
I would still research the word so I understand the context that it comes from.
In many contexts voice is just 声, by itself.
You can often guess words in context but I would not be trying to produce “new” (to you ) words.