How do I figure out for kanji which pronunciation to use when there’s so many?

6 comments

1. You don’t. You never “pronounce kanji.”

   Just like letters in English are different depending on the word.

   Memorize words. Each one has a pronunciation.

   Eventually you’ll notice patterns just like there are patterns in English letters, and Greek and Latin roots in English that help understanding and memorizing words.

   But ultimately the atomic unit of the language is words, focus on them.

2. For most situations it’s just easier to remember, but there are some patterns. For example when a kanji is alone (or with an okurigana), it’s usually kunyomi because most onyomi aren’t words by themselves. For example 水 (water) has “mizu” as kunyomi and “sui” as onyomi, but water in Japanese is “mizu”, not “sui”. So when I say “I drank water”, I say “mizu wo nomimashita”, not “sui wo nomimashita”. Words like water way 水道 (suidou) uses “sui”, while words like light blue 水色(mizuiro) uses “mizu”, so most of the time you just need to remember.

   Edit: corrected the kunyomi onyomi mix up

3. About 90% of kanji are 形声文字 i.e they contain their phonetic element. For example, 生 has the onyomi せい. Knowing this, 性 is also pronounced せい. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Keisei_moji_(%E5%BD%A2%E5%A3%B0%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97)

   Another rule you can use if that single Kanji tend to be read with their kunyomi whilst when in a compound, they’re read with their onyomi. Lots of exceptions though

4. As mentioned before, there aren’t really any rules that will tell you every time how to read a certain kanji. There are some general patterns though. In pretty much every compound word (a word consisting of more than one kanji) the component kanji will all be read with *either* their on-yomi *or* kun-yomi reading. It’s very rare that a word mixes the readings of component kanji. Additionally most of these compound words will use their on-yomi readings. Certain native japanese words use the kun-yomi reading though so you still need to memorise them. But if you really have no idea, guessing the on-yomi reading is usually not a bad guess.

   To give an example:

   粉薬 is read “konagusuri”. Those are the kun-yomi readings. 粉 – kona and 薬 – kusuri
   (Powder medicine)

   歩行者 is read “hokousha”. Those are all on-yomi readings.
   歩 – ho, 行 – kou and 者 – sha
   (Pedestrian)

5. Study words and the kanji will come. If you know every reading of a kanji and it in a new word for the first time, you still won’t know how to say it. Study words first, kanji second.

6. I recommend you find a graded reader in a topic you like that has Furigana over the kanji and the meaning of keywords in the text.