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I’ve been uncertain of this for some time, but now it’s starting to catch up with me.
I find that when I’m doing flash cards I’ll often use the wrong reading. I might say
じょう instead of うえ for 上.Now if I did that just for 上. I’d be OK, I could just force myself to figure it out. The problem is I do it for all of the kanji. I just never know when the answer is on’yomi or kun’yomi.
I believe I understand the difference between them, but for some reason the triggers are escaping me as to which reading is correct. I’m sure it’s something I’m missing or doing wrong, and I figure I better correct it soon.
What am I missing? How can I correct for this?
If you’re having trouble remembering when to use which reading, that has been discussed on the forum before and I recommend checking other threads like this one.
If you know when to use which reading but simply can’t remember which reading is which, that’s a different story. I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t bother learning readings specifically (especially not the kunyomi). Just start learning words, don’t think of 上 as a kanji that sounds like うえ、うわ、あ、しょう、じょう. Think of 上 as one word that means up/above and sounds like うえ. And think of 上手 as one word that sounds like じょうず.
Even if you do remember all the details of when to use which reading and which reading is which, it doesn’t prepare you for kanji that have multiple kun readings. If you think “When there are hiragana attached, I use the kun reading” you may well have trouble with things like 冷たい, 冷える, and 冷める all of which use kun readings, but they are different.
Interesting, so you’re suggesting to think of it less like a word that gets modified, and more like basic unit of a word, not unlike a letter.
In other words “上” isn’t that different from “O”, in that it’s just a part of a word. Sometimes it sounds like the “O” in “toe”, and other times like the “O” in “too”.
That makes it seem like there’s more to remember, but it feels more honest, and less confusing.
Am I getting your point correctly though?
What Kyle said ^
@MisterM2402 haha, I was wondering which “he” you meant in your original edit. I figured the timing was a bit suspicious. ;)
Can you confirm my understanding of what he said though?
@hey: Damn, you spotted that :P
Yeah, I think you’ve pretty much got it. Just think of a word being composed of two parts: the sound and the written representation. You learn the sound じょうず and you learn how to write it 上手. Over time you’ll recognise patterns in pronunciation/associated kanji, so you’ll effectively “pick up” readings as you go. Say you didn’t know one of the readings of 上 was じょう: you’d learn the word じょうず and then the word いじょう, notice that the じょう parts in both are written with 上, and thus you’ve learned a reading with no effort :D
Just think if someone was learning English and instead of just learning the name “Michael” as is, they went about learning every pronunciation of “ae” first. It’d be quite an inefficient way to do things.
If you learn readings just by learning vocab, then you’re only learning the readings you actually *need* at that specific moment in time. It’s efficient, streamlined ;)
Just want to add that one method of memorization isn’t necessarily better than the other; it depends on how you specifically learn and how much of the language you already know. I actually did teach my three-year-old son to read by showing him an English letter, such as A, and teaching him every possible pronunciation without giving context. I held up a flashcard with an A, then said, “/a/, ay, uh, aw.” It was a hair-brained scheme but it worked beautifully. From four years of age, he would read the atlas on long road trips with only minor advice from me. (Use the sss sound of C, not the kuh sound.) He was naturally able to “guess” which sound the letter made in a particular word because usually only one pronunciation produced a real word. (Puh-SIH-fik is a word; Puh-KIH-fik is not.)
But that only worked for him because he’s very verbal and because he already spoke fluent English. I’ve used that same method for learning Kanji with good results, but I’d been studying Japanese for more than a decade before I finally tackled Kanji, so I was already used to the way words are put together and what real words sound like. (For example, tossing a kun’yomi into the middle of a long on’yomi word just “feels” wrong.)
That said, when I tried to teach my daughter to read with this method, it probably went down in the history books as the most abysmal failure ever. She is not verbal at all, and she was so young when I started that she didn’t have a good grasp of English yet. Trying to teach her this way actually pushed her development back several years; she couldn’t read at all until she was six or seven. I ended up teaching her via the sight method instead (learning exactly how each specific word is spelled without worrying so much about WHY, like Kyle described), and she blossomed that way.
All that said, if one method isn’t working for you, you WILL find one that fits you better.
I’m rambling and possibly being pedantic, but it’s a fascinating topic to me. :)
EDIT: Skyle….?
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This reply was modified 12 years ago by
MomoIro.
There’s seven different ways to pronounce OUGH – did you really teach them all one by one? How about O pronounced as I, as in “women”, and other fun weird pronunciations?
@MomoIro – Pedantic? Is that even possible? ;)
Seriously, that’s actually a good thing to try to remember. Textfugu and every learning tool does it’s best to be general, which is good, but I need to monitor what I’m stumbling on, so I can course correct for my own limits.
@Joel: I skipped the funkiest pronunciations and took care of them when they came up. He was able to fill in most of the gaps on his own, though.
@MomoIro – I agree that the method you described might indeed work well for those who already have an extensive vocal word bank to pull from. One of the many differences between 1st and 2nd language learners and why I think people that say you should learn your second language the same way you learned your first are bonkers.
Good point. Not to mention the fact that it’s impossible. The way we learned English was through years of babbling along without having a clue what we were saying, being prompted and encouraged by a native speaker in our face the entire time. You just can’t recreate that environment.
@MomoIro: You’d been studying Japanese for more than a DECADE before you started learning kanji? But… what? I don’t get it XD What were you DOING for all that time? You can’t really read or write without them, so… I’m guessing you just listened to the radio, watched TV or talked to people maybe?
Even if you had studied ONE measly kanji per day, you could have been done in a little over half a decade :P Why didn’t you just start kanji when you started learning Japanese in the first place? I’m really curious haha :D
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This reply was modified 12 years ago by
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