So on here when your trying to learn kanji, how come for the kunyomi has about 4 different ways… - Feed Post by Myles223
So on here when your trying to learn kanji, how come for the kunyomi has about 4 different ways you can say the kanji. And sense theres about 4 diffrent ways you can say them which one do are you supposed to memorize because learning the strokes with all the different kunyomi readings and onyomi reads is just way to much. So am I only supposed to study one of them or do I have to memorize all of the kunyomi?
posted by Myles223
Comments 2
Yeah, that's how Japanese is, multiple readings, multiple meanings, and you gotta choose the one more appropriated for the situation.
Supposedly, you gotta memorize all of them. Ofc, if you wanna make sure you learn everything, the *ideal* way to study would be learning them all, but not everyone has the patience for that. As i am too lazy for that, i don't.
I mean, i believe there are ways around memorizing all of the reading right off the bat. One of them is just learning one reading (whichever you believe might be the main one), and associating the Kanji with its meaning. And then learn the other readings as you learn new words (vocab) that have that Kanji.
each kunyomi is associated with a word, lets look at 止 for a second:
とめ.る = 止める
とど.め = 止め
や.める = 止める
と.まる = 止まる
とど.まる = 止まる
や.む = 止む
よ.す = 止す
ーさ.す =-止す
(and probably some more)
some of these words you will probably come across in your first year of learning or so. Some of these words you might never come across / use. Which is part of the reason why i stated before that learning all kunyomi's with respect to a kanji doesn't give you as much bang for your buck than one would hope. In reality it leads to frustrating moments with kanji's such as 止, 生 and 行, and maybe even just straight up fatigue and aversion to learning those pesky scribbly chinese thingies.
There are 2 ways of going about this.
Firstly DON'T learn all kun's / on's. Only learn common ones. Which are common? Yeah well JapaneseClass doesn't really tell you. It's a fun platform to use casually but it lacks some options/levers here and there. The kanji dictionary at https://www.renshuu.org also shows you when THEY learn a specific reading in school, or if they don't at all. Note how in the example above you write とめる and やめる the same way in kanji? yeah, they don't. they usually only write とめる as 止める and just write やめる without kanji. consequently they simply don't learn the reading やめる for 止める in school. http://www.yamasa.org/ocjs/kanjidic.nsf/SearchKanji3 only displays readings that are learned in school. and then there is http://www.kanjidamage.com which only displays the readings they find to be most common in everyday life (generally giving the least readings of the 3)
Now learning kun's is all fine and dandy, but what you basically did was learn the pronunciation of a specific word that has something to do with the meaning of the kanji. that's like being able to correctly utter the word "surf" without knowing its meaning (surf what? like on water? the internet?) Most digital kanji/vocab learning platforms introduce kanji into your vocab once you have seen said kanji in their kanji quizzes. it is only then that you have somewhat of a grasp of what you learned to utter previously. So my advice, have a glance at the common once, but don't go hardcore learning them, you'll get to the word eventually and only then does the reading become actually useful.
