next noobness, onyomi, kunyomi???if they are katakan...is one katakana and one hirigana? - Feed Post by azza3695
next noobness, onyomi, kunyomi???if they are katakan...is one katakana and one hirigana?
posted by azza3695
Comments 7
no, they're only written hiragana and katakana to differentiate between the two.
...so what is onyomi and kunyomi?- they are different ways of the reading the character. Technically, the Onyomi is the Chinese reading and the Kunyomi is the Japanese reading. However, both is used in Japanese. Depending on the position of the kanji and whether it's standing alone or not, the reading can vary.
Both kunyomi and onyomi are written in hiragana.
The only reason why onyomi is shown in katakana on this website is simply to make it easier to recognise which reading is onyomi and which is kunyomi. This is what many dictionaries too, because if both onyomi and kunyomi were written in hiragana, it would be hard to learn which reading is onyomi or kunyomi.
Here's an example:
"Tuesday" in Japanese is 火曜日 ("kayoubi")
火 reading is onyomi, so is shown in katakana: カ ("ka")
曜 reading is onyomi, so is shown in katakana: ヨウ ("you")
日 reading is kunyomi, so is shown in hiragana: び ("bi")
If you want to write Tuesday (火曜日) in Japanese but without using kanji, then you DON'T write it like カヨウび (!)
You write it all in hiragana: かようび
Hiragana is the normal 'alphabet', so no matter whether it is kunyomi or onyomi, you write the word in hiragana if you aren't using the kanji form of a word.
Katakana is used for foreign origin words which don't have kanji forms at all, particularly modern words like テレビ ("terebi"), which you should be able to guess means "Television, TV". ^^- O3O so much learning so little time ^w^
- so its a grammatical point, and a preference point in the same as to writing it kanji or hirigana
- The rules for whether to use the kanji or to instead write it in hiragana aren't really that stict.
Really common and obvious words are often usually written in hiragana instead. Like:
ありがとう instead of it's kanji form 有難う ("arigatou")
Sometimes using the kanji form might be more confusing than just writing it in hiragana:
こんにちは ("kon'nichi wa") can be written in kanji as 今日は, but this kanji phrase can also be read as "kyou wa" which has a different meaning.
Formality level is another aspect to whether you should use kanji more. Newspapers use a lot of kanji; academic journals would use even more kanji, even rare ones; but friends chating online would be different, using hiragana more often instead.
When writing to young children or people who are beginners at learning Japanese, these readers wouldn't have learnt many kanji yet, so in this situation it is more sensible to write words in hiragana instead of kanji. But when writing to adults and advanced learners who should be proficient in reading Japanese, then you wouldn't dumb down the kanji words in the same way.
Some kanji are a lot more rare than others. Only 2136 kanji are taught in school in Japan, but there are thousands more kanji in existence... So words with uncommon kanji which aren't taught in school are much more likely to instead be written in hiragana.
Dictionaries usually tell you if a word is normally written in hiragana. If you check out "arigatou" in this online dictionary link, it says "usually written using kana alone" (kana is a word used to refer to both of hiragana and katakana--these are two types of kana):
http://www.jisho.org/words?jap=arigatou
