How does listening work when all kanji sound the same?

5 comments

1. 生 has like a million different readings depending on the context used. Just look them up and see for yourself

2. You generally don’t distinguish individual kanji; you distinguish words that are formed from them. When you hear しょうじょ, you shouldn’t be thinking “which kanji is read しょう?” Rather, you should know the word 少女 (even if you don’t remember the kanji) and recognize that that’s what’s being said. There are still some words that will be homophones/differentiated only by pitch accent; they should generally be distinct due to context (we don’t have much difficulty distinguishing between “pear” and “pair” in spoken English).

3. You are talking about single readings, and yes vocab makes a difference. But not only that, context as well. It may seem like you will confuse words left and right, but in reality that will rarely happen.

   彼は大学の後輩です。

   後輩 and 荒廃 are both read こうはい, but you would never confuse the two in a spoken sentence like the one above.

4. start listening and find out

   but people dont speak in kanji so its got nothing to do with it tbh

5. Started Wanikani the beginning of this year and I had the same question as you. But now that I’m nearing level 20 and after many listening practices things just click and your ears will automatically associate the right sound base on context.