I totally agree here. I knew a little Japanese before I started using Textfugu and everything on here was more or less a refresher/something I sort of already knew and then I got to the On’yomi Kun’yomi thing! Complete nightmare. It is, so far, the only aspect of Japanese that is screwing me up. Pretty much everything else I can comprehend/do more or less but the On’yomi Kun’yomi thing is completely unintelligible to me.
I think the most confusing thing about it is the fact that there’s really NOTHING like it in English, at least nothing formally acknowledged (the only thing I can think of Bruce Willis’s quote from the 5th Element “I only speak two languages: English and Bad English.” It seems like the on and kun readings are two parallel dimensions in Japanese that have nothing in common with each other, no rhyme or reason in their counterparts.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by  James Putnam.