How does one know which kanji pronunciation to use

11 comments

1. Paste the title of this post into google, chatgpt, reddit to get the answers you seek, this has been asked a million times

2. Practice. Exposure. Experience.

   As always.

3. Please search the feed, you can get way more info more quickly

   You learn words not letters, just like you don’t read English letter by letter either

4. Exposure. Sorry, there’s no easy, sure-fire way. Don’t give up, it’s easier than it seems!

5. For each word you learn, you have to learn the meaning, reading, and kanji used to write it. For many of words you learn, the meaning and reading will be logical and fall directly out of the on’yomi and kun’yomi of the kanji.

   Some words will be irregular. You’ll learn the irregular words one at a time.

   English is remarkably similar. Most words are spelled in a logical way. A few words are spelled in strange ways that don’t make much sense. When you learn an English word, you have to learn the meaning, pronunciation, and spelling.

   In any language, irregularities are more common in common words than uncommon words. So a lot of weird words with weird kanji or pronunciation show up early. You’ll get used to these due to seeing them all the time.

6. There is no system. You either know the word, or you don’t. You can’t learn a rule and guess which reading words will have.

   Most of the words themselves existed before Kanji was added to Japanese, so there isn’t much logic to how they wind up sounding with the characters added.

7. There are trends, but not hard rules for you to follow, that’s the trouble. Generally on’yomi is used when Chinese loan words are read in Japanese, and kun’yomi is used when Japanese-original words are assigned Chinese characters, so the trick is being able to differentiate between those. If you are attentive to the readings as you expand your vocabulary, you should naturally get a feel for it– all the easier if you’re a native Chinese speaker.

   I’d say a decent rule of thumb for beginners is to assume kun’yomi readings for words containing both kanji and kana, or words written as 1 standalone kanji; assume on’yomi for compound words with no kana, i.e. words spelled with 2 or more kanji. There’s tons of exceptions to that of course; in your OP for example, 二人 is kun’yomi and ニ is on’yomi. So it just amounts to guessing with 80-20ish odds rather than 50-50…

   Despite some of the bleak-sounding comments here though, organically reading kanji is definitely a skill you can acquire. I can certainly read words that I haven’t memorized the spellings for. The more experience you accumulate, the better your intuition will get, and the less you’ll have to rely on memorization. However, memorization is the only way to start.

8. Generally speaking, unless you’re in a class that requires it, memorizing all the readings of all the individual kanji isn’t worth it, and in my opinion also highly impractical.

   Instead, the standard advice is to use kanji as part of your regular vocab. That way you’ll acquire kanji readings naturally, without unnecessary headache.
   For this I’d definitely recommend using digital vocab cards, as they’re better able to combine kanji, readings and meanings.

9. With the enough exposure and practice you’ll just know. Simple as that. That’s something you just can’t explain. Kinda like how you know how to use and and not a comma which you know, from exposure. just gotta grind at it. Cause I was in your shoes once but with enough exposure, it became like English to me

10. It’s more a matter of learning individual words and noticing the kanji sound and meaning in each word that you learn.

    As others have said, there not anything that works 100% of the time. However, by far, the best way to guess is the following:

    **It’s a kun’yomi if there is only one kanji, especially if followed by kana to make up a word.

    ** It’s an on’yomi if a word is made up of more than one kanji in a row.

11. It doesn’t work in every situation, but most of the words with two or more kanji often have the onyomi, or Chinese reading. I guess cause they’re deriver from such. Often you start recognising some of the readings for this are linked to their radicals too. Like if it has 青 it sometimes is pronounced せい.

    The works with kanji followed by hiragana tend to be the kunyomi of Japanese reading.

    But as a lot of other people say here, the more of the words you see, read, hear, learn the more you get used to it.

    Good luck!