If I know all of the Joyo Kanji, does that mean I can guess the meaning and reading of other Kanji… - Feed Post by Bradlefty
If I know all of the Joyo Kanji, does that mean I can guess the meaning and reading of other Kanji that aren't taught in Japanese schools and get it right?
posted by Bradlefty
Comments 3
Nope. I'm not really sure what exactly you are implying by that question though...
If you mean, that since you'd be able to read virtually all the other kanji in the sentences, would you be able to guess correctly the meaning and reading of the odd non-jōyō kanji purely from context? Sometimes you'd be lucky, I guess. But you'd also need to know a lot of vocabulary to be able to do such a fill-in-the-blank kind of thing.
Like if for some reason you saw 其の車 written as the topic of the sentence, and you can read the entire of the rest of the sentence and know from context the topic is "that car", then yeah you might be able to guess 其の is the kanji form of a word usually written in kana...
其の = その "that". (其 is a non-jōyō kanji)
Otherwise nope, I don't think you'd much chance at guessing both meaning and reading of non-jōyō kanji. Knowledge of kanji radicals and other components should help quite a bit towards guessing, but not purely just knowing all the jōyō kanji. What was your thought behind the question though exactly?
I just thought if you know 2,136 characters and know the radical/component names and placements, you'd be able to guess Kanji readings and meanings correctly. I noticed some Kanji with the same radical on the same side have an exact or slightly-the-same on-reading as the other Kanji with the same radical and placement. I wonder how the Japanese learn their non-Joyo Kanji.- ...able to guess all the Kanji readings...*
