Can someone please explain the importance, if any, of a kanjis multiple readings?

9 comments

1. >If I understand that 市 means city, how could it possibly matter if I read it as し or いち?

   You understand it. All well and good. But will a Japanese person understand **YOU** if you start making up your own words? No.

   Modern kanji usage within Japan developed to accommodate real words already in use. Some of it was indigenous to Japan, some of it was imported from China, and some of it was even coined in Japan and re-imported back into China.

   This means that if you insisted on calling a market a しば or いちじょう, people won’t immediately know you mean 市場 because those two mish-mash readings just don’t refer to that word, even though 市 does indeed have いち and し as legitimate readings, and 場 does indeed have ば and じょう as legitimate readings.

2. Does it matter whether you read read as read or as read?

   Edit with serious answer: It matters because that’s just how it is. I know it sounds weird, but the point is that kanji are read in certain ways in certain environments.

   It’s like, does it matter if the letter “c” in English is read with a s sound or a k sound? Like pronouncing “pronunciation” as “pronunkiation”, or “curry” as “surry”.

   The general pattern of “if more than one kanji, then use Chinese reading” occurs because most Chinese words comprise more than one kanji/hanzi for disambiguation. And when the Japanese imported these words from Chinese, they heard the Chinese pronounce them in the actual Chinese way, and probably went like “hm Japanese doesn’t have that sound, but we can approximate it like this”. Like English borrowing the word “voila”, you know it’s pronounced “vwalah” and not “voyla”.

   The pattern doesn’t always hold because you have 重箱(じゅうばこ)読み and 湯桶(ゆとう)読み as well. They are like this because that’s just how it is.

3. You would be able to read stuff but not be able to comprehend what you’re listening.

4. >how it can matter which reading is used

   In the word “receive,” how much does it matter which reading of C is used? Do you say “rekeive” or “reseive”? It’s like that–with a very few exceptions, one is absolutely right and one is absolutely wrong. It just depends on the individual word. 都市 is always とし, and 市場 is always いちば [EDIT: except when it’s しじょう, thank you u/Excrucius — いちば is a classic market where food and stuff is sold, しじょう is like an economic/stock market]. To read them otherwise is like saying “rekeive” [EDIT: Or, in the case of 市場, to pick the wrong one is like saying “read” when you meant “read”–same spelling, different meaning.]

   >I know that there’s a general rule for it which reading to use: stand-alone kanji use the Japanese reading while compounds use the Chinese reading, but how does it matter?

   This is a *tendency*, and nothing more. It’ll take you a fair bit of the way, but there are also so many words that don’t follow it that you shouldn’t put too much stock in it, aside from letting it be a general guideline when you’re not sure how to read something.

   >Both words, of course, can mean something else: 1 and child. Possibly others.

   Don’t think of readings as words. They’re *parts* of words (unless we’re talking about single-kanji words).

5. Of course it matters, if you plan on reading aloud, listening, or speaking. How do you expect people to understand you if you say everything wrong?

   都市 toshi means city. 都市 miyakoichi is gibberish that nobody will understand.

6. Kanji have multiple possible readings, when used in different words. Only one reading goes with one word.

   The kun’yomi reading いち would only be used when the kanji is used alone 市(いち) to mean market、or in a specific compound word 市場(いちば). The on’yomi し reading is used in the majority of other compounds like 市役所(しやくしょ), municipal office, or used as a suffix to mean city, like 東京市(とうきょうし), Tokyo city.

   You can’t substitute or mix readings. One reading goes with one word. There’s usually no ambiguity which reading is supposed to be used, based on the word that Kanji is used in.

7. there’s no such thing as reading kanji, only words

   kanji do not have independent readings that you need to piece together to form word pronunciations (yes there are yomi for each but they’re just a summary of all the different ways they happen to have been used ever in any word)

   you don’t memorize all the ways the letter “c” is pronounced, and then sound out every word that has a “c” in it, and kanji is the same

   when you learn a new word, learn it’s pronunciation, spelling (kanji if any), definition, and usage

   you can only possibly know how to pronounce a word by identifying the word by context in a sentence, and then knowing how that word is pronounced

8. If you’re looking for a practical explanation, there really isn’t one. It’s just part of the language’s history and how it evolved after it came from the mainland.

9. It matters because it’d be insane if people just used whatever reading they felt like and you were just supposed to guess what word it was they were trying to say.
   That’s just how ひもとかた (日本語） works.

   As I understand it, originally, kanji only had their Chinese reading, so you’d read 山, the kanji for mountain as さん, but they already had a word for mountain in Japanese, which is やま, but if you wanted to write やま you’d have to write it like 矢間 or something like that, which was kind of a bad system.
   Eventually they decided “Why don’t we take this kanji that means mountain and also pronounce it as mountain, sometimes?” and thus kunyomi was born probably.