Question
Updated on
17 Jan 2015
- English (US)
-
Japanese
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Question about Japanese
What is the difference between 音読み and 訓読み for kanji? And when do you use either one? I'm still confused on this.
What is the difference between 音読み and 訓読み for kanji? And when do you use either one? I'm still confused on this.
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17 Jan 2015
Featured answer
- English (UK)
It's more than just poetry, krissied. Native Japanese had words for all sorts of nature and concrete things like river, trees, sky, blue, et cetera. When the Buddhist scholars arrived with their writing system, they also brought with them more esoteric concepts like government, taxation, soldiers, et cetera. So you'll often find that the older and more concrete a word is, the more likely it is to use kun'yomi. =)
General rule of thumb is that you use the kun'yomi when a kanji is on its own, or has okurigana stapled on the back, and on'yomi when it's in a compound word with other kanji. However, there's about a thousand and one exceptions to that.
For example, 口 has on'yomi こう and kun'yomi くち. When it's standing by itself, you read it as くち, but when it's in the word 人口, it switches to on'yomi - じんこう. But then, 川口 uses kun'yomi - かわぐち.
Basically, learn vocab and you'll start to learn the readings of the kanji as you go along. You'll get a feel for it after a while. Once you've learnt a bunch, you'll start to be able to intuit the readings of new words you've never seen before.
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- English (US)
I'll tell you what I understand from my studies: kanji are Chinese characters which have been assigned to Japanese words/ideas in addition to the Japanese approximations of their original pronunciations in Chinese. This is leftover from centuries ago when learning to speak and read Chinese was the mark of an educated person. At that time, although the Japanese had their own culture and spoken language, they didn't have a unique, formal system of writing. (Hiragana and katakana were developed later) So when people learned to read Classical Chinese things like poetry, they read it in close approximations of the original Chinese sounds, (音読み) but they could use the same characters to express the same ideas in Japanese words (訓読み)
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- English (US)
How do you know which one I should use to pronounce the kanji?
- English (UK)
It's more than just poetry, krissied. Native Japanese had words for all sorts of nature and concrete things like river, trees, sky, blue, et cetera. When the Buddhist scholars arrived with their writing system, they also brought with them more esoteric concepts like government, taxation, soldiers, et cetera. So you'll often find that the older and more concrete a word is, the more likely it is to use kun'yomi. =)
General rule of thumb is that you use the kun'yomi when a kanji is on its own, or has okurigana stapled on the back, and on'yomi when it's in a compound word with other kanji. However, there's about a thousand and one exceptions to that.
For example, 口 has on'yomi こう and kun'yomi くち. When it's standing by itself, you read it as くち, but when it's in the word 人口, it switches to on'yomi - じんこう. But then, 川口 uses kun'yomi - かわぐち.
Basically, learn vocab and you'll start to learn the readings of the kanji as you go along. You'll get a feel for it after a while. Once you've learnt a bunch, you'll start to be able to intuit the readings of new words you've never seen before.
Was this answer helpful?
- English (US)
Thank you so much belthazar, I understand it now ^_^
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