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When would we use the reading of the kanji as opposed to the on’yomi or kun’yomi pronunciations?
The “reading” is the on’yomi. The kun’yomi pops up only in the “vocab” section.
I’ve never had the foggiest idea why he describes them quite like that.
Thanks for the reply, but it really confuses me when words like 力, the reading is りょく but by itself it can also be read as ちから. Really throwin’ me off.
Aye. りょく is the on’yomi, ちから is the kun’yomi.
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 9 years, 9 months ago by
James Putnam.
What they have in common is meaning. =)
Basically, in ye olden days of prehistory, Japan had its own spoken language but no written language. When Buddhist scholars arrived from China, they brought the Chinese writing system with them, and it became kanji. Chinese characters were used to write Japanese words which already existed, so the Japanese pronunciation was attached to the Chinese characters. This is the kun’yomi. However, the Chinese characters also came with the Chinese spoken language already attached to them, so these readings were added to Japanese as well – this in the on’yomi. Thing is, both readings referred to the same word. Or at least, they did at the time – etymology has probably changed a few things in the intervening centuries…
The only thing I can think of that is similar is the word “read”.
You read a book, and when you are done with it, you have read the book. It really gets to be a pain if the cover is red.
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This reply was modified 9 years, 9 months ago by
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