Re: On vs. Kun reading?

jim_breen_at_idontreadhotmail.com
Date: 06/07/04 

Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 04:01:49 GMT

Bob Clark <bclark@no_spamairmail.net> dixit:
>I am starting to work on the kanji in earnest this week. I was reviewing my
>kanji reference today and was noting the on and kun readings. How do I
>determine when to use the on or the kun reading in a written document?

You mean when you are reading the document? Most of the time it will be
the on reading in multi-kanji compounds and the kun reading when the kanji
is solo, but there are exceptions to both of these, and cases like
$BBf=j(B where it is mixed. Practice is what it takes.

>How
>do I determine where word boundaries are in a written Japanese sentence?

By practice and the acquisition of a grounding in grammar and a large
vocabulary. Cheer up; it's a non-trivial problem. In NLP it was thought to
be a Very Hard Problem until Nagao et al. came out with Juman and showed
that it wasn't really so hard after all. Not having rigid ideas about the
concept of "word" helps.

>It
>looks like the particles are all in hiragana, Is this a correct observation?

For the documents you are likely to be reading; yes.

>I have noticed as many as 5 kanji in a row, can there be more than one word
>represented with no breaks between the kanji by hiragana or spaces?

Yes. The typical Japanese "multi-word expression", to use the tag from
linguistics, often consists of a string of kanji. As you get used to it
they'll seem OK. Newspaper headlines are the ultimate. They often leave
out particles and even toss out extraneous kanji if the original compound
can be deduced from the remnants.

>I am
>using Hadamitzky and Spahn's "Kanji & Kana" book. Is this a good book to
>use for my initial study?

Dunno. Never used it. 

-- 
Jim Breen        http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/
Computer Science & Software Engineering,
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia 
$B%8%`!&%V%j!<%s(B@$B%b%J%7%eBg3X(B

Relevant Pages

  • Re: On vs. Kun reading?
    ... > kanji reference today and was noting the on and kun readings. ... > looks like the particles are all in hiragana, ...
    (sci.lang.japan)
  • Re: On vs. Kun reading?
    ... > kanji reference today and was noting the on and kun readings. ... > determine when to use the on or the kun reading in a written document? ... Memorize the particles first and then ... Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, so try to remember actual compounds in context rather ...
    (sci.lang.japan)
  • Re: Reading kanji
    ... on or kun reading of a kanji is used in various words? ... and the others are in hiragana. ... Kanji dictionaries using romaji, such ...
    (sci.lang.japan)
  • Re: On vs. Kun reading?
    ... >>kanji reference today and was noting the on and kun readings. ... >the on reading in multi-kanji compounds and the kun reading when the kanji ... >>looks like the particles are all in hiragana, ...
    (sci.lang.japan)
  • Reading kanji
    ... is there any pattern to whether the ... on or kun reading of a kanji is used in various words? ... and the others are in hiragana. ...
    (sci.lang.japan)
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