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So I’m in Season 2, and there were 4 Kanji to learn. I still don’t really understand the difference between Kun’yomi and On’yomi, but the thing that’s really confusing me is this ‘practise’ page.
I have no problems at all with anything up until the kanji, and I have no idea how the heck they work. The four we were supposed to learn were one, two, seven and nine. I know the numbers these refer to (Ichi, Ni, Shichi, Kyu) and I’m working on the second part （ひとつ etc.）but on this page it shows” 一人 でした” – how the heck am I suppose to know what the first bit means? When you click play it sounds like “Hitori” but I can’t see how on earth I could have worked that out. Okay I can sort of see how I know that as that specific one has that as the fourth definition on its page, but for this one “七人 じゃありません” there’s no definition on either page for how one would pronounce “七人” and I don’t know how one would interpret it otherwise. Help?
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This topic was modified 12 years, 8 months ago by
Matthew Lowery.
Hey Matthew. The only explanation I can think of is that 人 used to be in the first batch of kanji and this was later changed. You can see 一人 in the vocab section of the page.
七人 uses the onyomi readings of 七 and 人 to make 「しち・にん」, which, in the same way that 一人 means “one person”, means “seven people”.
As for how you were supposed to know this, I have absolutely no idea. Hopefully I’ve helped.
AnonymousThe official rule is that if there is JUKUGO, or compound-kanji (at least 2 kanji NEXT to each other), both kanji use the ON’YOMI.
You use the KUN’YOMI when the kanji is BY ITSELF. You also use the KUN’YOMI when hiragana FOLLOWS the kanji to generate the meaning of the word.
HOWEVER, EXCEPTIONS are ALL OVER THE PLACE. A kanji by itself may favor the on’yomi, and two kanji in jukugo may favor the kun’yomi. A jukugo may even have on’yomi for one kanji and kun’yomi for the other!
An example of such exceptions are numbers. Although the number may be by itself, it uses the on’yomi reading instead of the kun’yomi (remember, a kanji by itself is supposed to use the KUN’yomi.).
I usually try to just know the actually word in the first place, and then understand how the reading of the kanji works. I’d say that despite these rules, at least 45% of all words have these reading exceptions.
Good luck!一人 = ひとり
二人 = ふたりThese are the only exceptions for readings, so far as counting people goes – the rest follow the standard readings. The weirder exceptions are not really something you can just infer. As Tsetycoon was saying (but didn’t really state explicitly), the only way to remember is to just learn the exceptions one by one.
(When it comes to the other counters, there’s a few more exceptions. Counting days especially.)
http://www.tofugu.com/2010/03/23/the-types-of-kanji-in-japanese-onyomi-vs-kunyomi/
It’s actually quite simple but it is a bit confusing at first and you have to be careful, you’ll get used to it.
一人 is in the anki vocab pack ( http://www.textfugu.com/season-2/past-tense-nouns/4-3/#top ), but if you do find something that you don’t recognise, jisho.org is your friend, or maybe google translate (pretends to be your friend but says nasty things behind your back, but at least for this it should be ok)
Find some other tools to help you and if there is something sneaky slipped in try and figure it out using other tools, you learn better when you learn yourself, than if someone teaches you :D
****ing counters, how do they work?
Though they’re much rarer in English, they do still exist – for example, “head” in “ten head of cattle” is a counter. Same as “pairs” in “ten pairs of pants”. They work the same way in Japanese. 京都市には147万人ぐらいの人が住んでいます – the first 人 is にん, the counter for people, while the second is ひと, the word “people”. Or これを十冊下さい – ten of these (books) please.
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This topic was modified 12 years, 8 months ago by
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