I’m currently creating my own Anki deck for the purposes of expanding my vocabulary and I was wondering if it’s a good idea to distinguish furigana with katakana for on’yomi readings. Most dictionaries including Jisho display hiragana even above on’yomi compounds so I was wondering if this is the right thing to do.
I personally feel like this is an effective way to remind myself what reading a word belongs to, and since on’yomi readings are usually written in katakana it only seems natural to me.
What do you think? Does it even matter?
4 comments
On’yomi readings in a dictionary are written in katakana, but the words themselves would be written in hiragana if the kanji aren’t used. For example 先（セン）生（セイ）= せんせい. So I feel that it’s ultimately up to you. But if your focus is on the on’yomi and kun’yomi readings, then it might be a good idea to use katakana to distinguish the on’yomi readings.
I don’t think it even matters. Whether a reading is ON or Kun is really just trivia, like in English, whether a root in a compound word is greek or latin.
The important thing is that you learn how to read the word, not that you learn the history of the readings used in it.
Over time you’ll get a good general sense for what readings are used in kanji compounds and what readings are used mixed with kana — the former mostly being ON and the latter mostly being Kun. Knowing the odd exceptions is pure trivia that won’t help anything since they are the exceptions and not the pattern.
Making mixed furigana seems like it take time better spent elsewhere and accomplish nothing useful, maybe even make the cards harder to read, depending on how used to both kana sets and irregular kana usage you are.
If you’re more concerned about some class requirement than learning to read Japanese then maybe it has value for improving your test results, but I don’t think it will help with learning to read or speak Japanese.
I think once you reach a good enough level of Japanese it will be completely obvious if a reading is Chinese or not on sight in the vast majority of cases, but katakana for on-yomi is a common convention in dictionaries.
I think it’s a good idea (assuming you can implement it quickly/easily) simply because regardless of the value of knowing which reading is which (FWIW, I like knowing because it makes patterns and pattern-breakers easier to spot), displaying on’yomi as katakana can potentially give you LOTS of extra exposure to katakana and make you quicker at correctly reading/discerning even the trickier ones everyone loves to complain about, ツシソン. I’ve seen plenty of learners say they feel comfortable reading most Japanese, but still stumble a frustrating amount over katakana, so this can be a way of “working” to avoid that.
The other plus side to doing this, is that once it’s set up, you get this extra information (and katakana reading practice) for absolutely free, i.e. no additional time needed during your reviews to acquire it.