掲示板 Forums - Kanji... I want to give it a go but...

I tried it a while ago, my first kanji. I saw it and said nope. However some peeked my interest like the common kanji 山 and I want to give it another go. We have some clearing up to do though.

1. Can someone please think of a

mnemonic for Kunyomi and Onyomi? When do you use what?

2. If one of the meanings for person is hito. Then why is the word lovers kobito 恋人? Why does it suddenly change into bi?

3. Lets stay with the kanji. 人

I understand some kanji have like 10 meanings but most of them are advanced level. But here there are 2 onyomi learned in primary school level. When do I know which one it is?

Kunyomi: ひと 小

Onyomi: ジン 小, ニン 小

4. How do you keep apart kanji that are almost the same? Like 永水氷. Is it just practice or is there any skill to it?

Thanks!!

That’s a lot of questions. Okay, here goes:

On’yomi comes from 音 (sound). You may already know the word 五十音 (50 sounds) from learning the kana. The on’yomi approximate the sounds of the kanji from Chinese. That’s your mnemonic for on’yomi.

Kun’yomi comes from 訓 (teach). You probably don’t know any other kun-words yet, so as a mnemonic use くに instead. Kun’yomi are unique to Japanese, so they are the national (kuni) readings.

The sound transformation that turns hito into bito is called rendaku 連濁, and it happens every time two words are concatenated to form a compound. Think of it as an audible hyphen.

There really isn’t any reliable way to “know” which reading is used in a particular word (although you do develop a sense for it after a while). You just have to learn each word individually. That’s one of the fundamental challenges of learning Japanese.

The best way to develop your skills at distinguishing similar looking characters is probably to practice writing them. When you have to remember where each stroke goes and in what order, similarities seem to vanish and the differences stand out. Learning the components that make up each character helps too.

So if onyomi is from Chinese , is that why it is written in katagana because it is foreign ?

Onyomi: クン

I wanted to say that Onyomi is only with other kanji? But then I saw it written that Kunyomi also occurs if there is only 1 kanji so that a bad mnemonic

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Im trying to grasp the concept of rendaku and a crazy world opened to me I will read into it more when I have the time.

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thanks for taking your time! (Also to the other people reacting on this!!)

You can always just learn kanji in the context of vocabulary. Even if you know all of the readings for all of the kanji, there are still words with exceptions (that don’t use those readings). Not to say that knowing the readings is useless, but rather saying that you can learn them through the context of regular words. It’s much less boring, at the very least.