In regards to kanji, I’ve found that kunyomi pronunciations stick way easier than onyomi, even when I’m only trying to remember it by a single onyomi. Obviously, both sets of pronunciations are going to be necessary inmost cases, but just for getting the initial kanji down in your head I find that kunyomi (when applicable) are easier to learn the meaning and a pronunciation for most kanji.
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Personally onyomi stick better for me. Probably just personal taste for sounds or something, it doesn’t mean anything in the long run. They’ll all stick eventually if you apply forehead to brick wall hard enough.
Kunyomi are easier for memorization imo since typically just with the kunyomi you can learn a new word, which will help the kanji stick.
For onyomi you usually have to learn a compound word containing it if you want an example, so it’s slightly harder to make it stick.
When you learn more and more kanji, you’ll notice that a lot of similar looking kanji have similar or outright the same onyomi.
For examples: 講、溝、構
All of these kanji has the same onyomi (こう), but very different kunyomi which are こう、みぞ、かま(える) respectively.
You’ll have easier time remembering onyomi than kunyomi the more you study kanji imo.
Once advanced enough, your intuition gains the ability to take care of onyomi for the considerable number of kanji, because of how kanji works to begin with.
Certain kanji has much less use in kunyomi e.g. 懇ろ, or has the same damn okurigana while being read different, e.g. 初める, 埋める, which are (presumably) all a pain to a certain degree.
Or idk maybe that’s not how it works for a learner, what do I know.
Considering i can guess onyomi from thin air, onyomi is easier to “learn”.
However, onyomi can quite literally come in 5 flavors per kanji for a good subset of kanji, whereas 1 kunyomi might be shared over many kanji.
Kunyomi might be easier to learn.
Personally, it doesn’t matter if it’s kunyomi or onyomi. What matters is whether or not I get to see the word often.
Neither?
Both?
Honestly I don’t learn a kanji and it’s readings isolated.
I may learn 現れる (arawareru) and then later learn 現代 (gendai) and honestly not even realize that I now know 2 readings for 1 kanji.
I mean, why learn that 子’s kunyomi is “ko”, and the onyomi is “shi” “su” “tsu”, when sometimes it doesn’t follow the rules anyway and 息子 is “musuko”
Why guess what sound 子 makes in 椅子 or 帽子? I just learned the kanji spelling along with the word so it’s never been a question.
Onyomi. Onyomi are used in much more words and similar looking onyomi often sound similar (thank you, China).
I wouldn’t learn kunyomi without words. They are usually rarely used if you’re beyond the most common 1000 words. Just learn them with the words that use them, that saves a lot of time. Same with rarely used onyomi. Learning all pronunciations of a kanji separately is a huge waste of time and much harder in the end.
Working the most common onyomi (only one or two) of a kanji into your meaning mnemonics for it is quite useful though.
kunyomi since a lot of kanji are a verb that uses the reading
Onyomi are easier to remember IMO, because Chinese characters are often composed of a radical that gives a vague meaning and then another symbol that gives a (Chinese) pronunciation, so it only works for onyomi. Matt Vs Japan has a great video illustrating this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOj4zOcNdak
Cure Dolly has one too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfAjdBj-p8U
Plus you just run into onyomi all the time as you’re learning new words. Which is probably how you want to learn kanji readings anyways. Japanese kids in school can drill kanji readings because they’re already fluent and already know thousands of words they can couple with the kanji they study. Learners like us don’t, we need to learn a ton of vocabulary.
I generally pick up the onyomi sooner than kunyomi, because I already speak Mandarin and some Hokkien and I’m used to 漢字 having many readings (e.g. friends’ names, business’ names, can be read in Mandarin or in Hokkien). A lot of onyomi readings actually correspond better to the coastal southern Chinese languages like Hokkien than northern, Mongol/Manchu-influenced Mandarin – not surprising given which eras and locales kanji readings were borrowed from.
Another reason I guess is kunyomi are often longer and multisyllabic (whereas onyomi are mostly monosyllabic).
The nice thing about kunyomi though is that, because they are stems used to construct many verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns, there seems to be a lot of mileage in acquiring the common ones.
I often feel a bigger sense of achievement acquiring kunyomi vocabulary than onyomi ones (might just be that more challenging things feel more rewarding).
I learned Korean before I started with Japanese. There are some Korean words that are cognates for Japanese words. There are even more Korean cognates for Chinese words.
The onyomi is easier to me personally because it is more likely to sound a lot like the Korean words I already know than the Japanese words I’m just learning.
**Example :** 南 in Korean is 남 (nam). That’s much closer to なん than みなみ.
I mean let’s be real 99% of kanji have こう as onyomi anyway
I think of kun’yomi and on’yomi as entirely different things. Kun’yomi are words, oral words, before they have anything to do with kanji. They’re just actual words that one speaks, and they’re written with kanji for convenience because those kanji happen to match their meaning. Their connection to kanji are very loose. On’yomi, on the other hand, are welded tightly to their kanji, and words with on’yomi are built out of them. In other words, on’yomi are parts of characters that make up words, while kun’yomi are words that get written with characters.
So, to address your last sentence–the kun’yomi is the *meaning* of the character, while the on’yomi is the *sound* of the character. And therefore only the on’yomi gets logged in my head as “a reading for this character,” though of course some kun’yomi get so strongly associated with a particular character that I’ll treat it in the outer world as if it’s a reading. Still, it helps me at least to associate only the on’yomi with the character in a direct sense.
For a lot of kanji I already know the verb or adjective, so kunyomi is easier. But for those where I don’t, onyomi is a lot easier, there’s something about the sound “menu” being fairly limited that makes it easy for me to recall them.
Neither, just learn vocab and ignore if it’s kunyomi or onyomi
whichever wanikani tells me to learn haha
I learn by words. Learn them as I need them
No, actually I found more easier to write them and get used to their shape. After around 6 months it was more easy to simply recognize them and by now I can read almost whatever kanji and if I cannot read it I just write it out of memory to look for it using a drawing keyboard
For me, things stick in my head much better if I have a context to attach them to — which in this case means I’ll learn whichever reading actually comes up as part of some word that I see reasonably frequently.
As a very concrete example for myself, I completely bounced on memorizing 直 as なお but found it much easier to memorize as じき because 正直 (しょうじき) is something people say a lot when talking about their own feelings.
I treat onyomi as the inherent readings of the kanji. I do not personally treat kunyomi as readings intrinsic to a kanji. Kunyomi tend to be native Japanese words that had kanji superimposed on them to signify the nuance of the word, a result of Japan’s literary tradition of translating Classical Chinese almost word-for-word into Japanese (Kakikudashi-bun). In some cases, the kunyomi is indeed used phonetically, as in 御目出度う, but I see that as a secondary usage of kunyomi.
I don’t find it very helpful to memorize every single onyomi and every single kunyomi of a kanji. Memorizing the onyomi is slightly more helpful than memorizing the kunyomi, since the onyomi are repeated in many words. The kunyomi however are words in their own right, so there’s no point, in my
opinion, to memorize them, unless you memorize them as vocabulary words and not merely “sounds a kanji can make”.
That is to say, when I learn a kanji, I take note of its reading in the context I read it in. If it piques my interest, I might investigate what other words that kanji is used in, but it isn’t always helpful to learn all the vocabulary a kanji can possibly appear in. Just learn kanji from the words you actually see them being used in. If you want to learn the other readings of a kanji, learn additional vocabulary words that use that reading.
Same. I easily memorise kunyomi and struggle a lot with onyomi and noticed this especially when I recently started Wanikani. Whenever I am in a rut with an onyomi reading, I look up the kanji on [jisho.org](https://jisho.org) and find an on reading compound for that kanji that will be easier for me to remember moving forward.
A recent example is 右 and 左 and for the life of me I never could get that onyomi right, but I since learned about 最右 and 最左 and I didn’t just remember the onyomi easily, I have gained new vocab for right-most and left-most.