Re: On vs. Kun reading?

From: Kevin Wayne Williams (kww.nihongo_at_verizon.nut)
Date: 06/07/04 

Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 04:19:22 GMT

Bob Clark wrote:

> 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? How
> do I determine where word boundaries are in a written Japanese sentence? It
> looks like the particles are all in hiragana, Is this a correct observation?
> 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? I am
> using Hadamitzky and Spahn's "Kanji & Kana" book. Is this a good book to
> use for my initial study?

Unfortunately, there is only one real answer to most of those questions:
you need to know the words and be able to make good guesses about
particles. That is one of the reasons why you keep seeing me and many of
the others trying to steer people away from trying to learn kanji as an
isolated topic, and into learning kanji in the context of words.

Tips for the beginner: normally, a transition from hiragana to kanji or
katakana marks the beginning of a word. The transition from katakana to
hiragana will mark a particle. The transition from kanji to hiragana may
mark a particle if the word in kanji was a noun, or to some form of
inflection or conjugation string if you had a verb or an adjective. Some
nouns are normally written with a trailing hiragana string as well.
Simple words are frequently written in hiragana, and reading a string of
hiragana is based solely on recognizing the words and particles. There
are exceptions: words that start with hiragana and end with kanji, words
that mix katakana and hiragana, and words that mix katakana and kanji.
You pretty much need to learn those on a case by case basis. It sounds
horrible, but if you do it long enough, it actually becomes nearly
instinctive.

I learned with the brute force approach that Jeff warns against:
furiganaed manga, Hamaditzky and Spahn, and a dictionary. It was
painful, but effective. Chris Kern has some textbooks that he normally
recommends (I think they are "The Basic Kanji Book" and "Kanji in
Context", but I may be wrong), and he will probably chime in shortly.
People that have taken his advice usually seem happy that they have done
so. For the basics of readings and how to write the characters, you
can't do much better than Hamaditzky and Spahn.

KWW

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