日本語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread 6

If you have a question about the language, ask it and fellow 4channers might see it and answer it for you.

Japanese - Ask questions thread
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1174719097/1-40

日語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread2 質問
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1206158123/1-40

日本語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread 3
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1267485093/1-40

日本語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread 4
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1302350850/1-40

日本語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread 5
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1330050873/1-40

>>248
Every character can have Japanese (on/おん) and Chinese (kun/くん) readings. There can also be arbitrary readings (ateji/当て字) such as 煙草 (たばこ) but these are relatively rare.

Maybe you already knew that. As far as learning them goes, though, I did Heisig after two years of trying to memorize directly and found it helped. Whether or not you like that method, I feel it's very important to have some way of identifying individual radicals so that each one is a sum of parts - this makes it much easier. Heisig for me was mostly a way of realizing this.

After that, I mainly learned through seeing the characters in words (I read light novels and play video games, mainly). You see certain readings more than others, and you begin to get a sense for what sounds like what. It's a feeling similar to spelling in English - you can see a word you don't know how to pronounce, but you can guess based on other times you've seen similar patterns. For example, in 生, there is a ridiculous number of readings if you were to just check a kanji dictionary. But you'll quickly learn that it's virtually always せい except in compounds where it is also frequently しょう or even じょう, and then when it has furigana it's almost always う as in うまれる. The other readings, when you see them, you can learn at that point. I don't think there's really much value in just slamming readings alone, because you'll have nothing to attach them to (i.e., words).