so the kanji for fireworks is flower + fire 花火 , hanabi , but hana is kunyomi for flower and the onyomi for flower is KA, why in this compound words the kunyomi is used instead of the onyomi, it should be kabi or something, so why is this the case?

Actually the onyomi onyomi reading would be かか.

i thought fire has multiple onyomis KA, hi, -bi, ho- , correct me if i'm wrong

The honest answer is "Because it uses the kunyomi". Unless you want to get deep into etymology, I doubt there's any reason it's that way, besides "That's how it's pronounced".

Even fairly consistent rules get broken sometimes, just know that it's はなび and move on.
Unless you want the etymology, in which case someone else will need to pipe in.

sholum Wrote:The honest answer is "Because it uses the kunyomi". Unless you want to get deep into etymology, I doubt there's any reason it's that way, besides "That's how it's pronounced".

Even fairly consistent rules get broken sometimes, just know that it's はなび and move on.
Unless you want the etymology, in which case someone else will need to pipe in.

is there a name for this inconsistency? i want to find the list of compound words that uses kunyomi that aren't kokuji

hazwanium Wrote:is there a name for this inconsistency? i want to find the list of compound words that uses kunyomi that aren't kokuji

The list would be enormous. This is not rare at all. I don't know what it's called if it it even has a name, but I am currently studying for Kanken level 6, and there is a whole test section (at least in my practice software), where you are given a two character compound, and you must choose whether it's composed of:

- an ONyomi + KUNyomi
- an ONyomi + ONyomi
- a KUNyomi + KUNyomi
- a KUNyomi + ONyomi

hazwanium Wrote:i thought fire has multiple onyomis KA, hi, -bi, ho- , correct me if i'm wrong

Only the first one is an on'yomi.

Couldn't find a name for the phenomenom on English Wikipedia. ashman63 is right, it's too common to be worth listing out. You'll get a feel for it, eventually.

ashman63 Wrote:

hazwanium Wrote:is there a name for this inconsistency? i want to find the list of compound words that uses kunyomi that aren't kokuji

The list would be enormous. This is not rare at all. I don't know what it's called if it it even has a name, but I am currently studying for Kanken level 6, and there is a whole test section (at least in my practice software), where you are given a two character compound, and you must choose whether it's composed of:

- an ONyomi + KUNyomi
- an ONyomi + ONyomi
- a KUNyomi + KUNyomi
- a KUNyomi + ONyomi

wow i didn't know about this, japanese is even harder than i initially thought, i am completely demoralized right now lol

hazwanium Wrote:wow i didn't know about this, japanese is even harder than i initially thought, i am completely demoralized right now lol

Oh, there are probably much more "obstacles" you don't yet know about. I think acceptance of the fact that the amount of things to learn is almost incomprehensible is one of the most important steps towards getting fluent in Japanese. You can't learn it all at once, but people have proven over and over again that it is certainly possible with enough dedication, practice, and above all, patience. Still, readings will probably keep tripping you up, even ten years from now. There are far too much special cases to learn them all, even for the Japanese. However eventually the exceptions you don't know will be rare enough to not pose a problem when reading.

The words that use ON readings are actually loan words from chinese, which is why they don't work within japanese grammar and require the use of helpers to become adverbs, adjectives and verbs (で, に, な, する, etc.). Japanese is an anomaly because it has so many loan words that the genuine japanese words feel the exception rather than the norm.

Hanabi is a genuine japanese word, and therefore it's spelled using the KUN reading. Compound words are naturally written by grouping the base words, and because japanese lacked a writing system, they used the chinese characters for flower 花 and fire 火.

The problem is that written in that way, there's ambiguity in how 花火 should be read. Modern japanese tries to place okurigana on the compound words when they have KUN (japanese) reading, but in this case it cannot be done.

Japanese has so many irregular readings that the best approach is to learn the pronounciation of every word separately. That makes japanese in practice a language with +50.000 "letters" (some of them with multiple readings), which is why japanese is such a pain to learn. As a rule of thumb, languages originated on islands are more irregular than continental ones, so you'll have to deal with the way it is.

hazwanium Wrote:i thought fire has multiple onyomis KA, hi, -bi, ho- , correct me if i'm wrong

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the hi reading is kunyomi?

Anyway, thinking about why a certain reading is used is a complete waste of time, it just is. Just focus on remembering the reading instead. But yeah it's annoying, I make the mistake of pronouncing words in my head that I've never looked up way too often. For example, the word 人質 I would pronounce じんしつ in my head for probably several months until I realized I was wrong.

Wait until you find out about the millions of onomatopoeia you won't find in any dictionary.

edit: I tried to find a list with "all" the onomatopoeia so I could learn them all at once when I started learning Japanese.

hazwanium Wrote:wow i didn't know about this, japanese is even harder than i initially thought, i am completely demoralized right now lol

You shouldn't be.
Japanese, like any other language, is made by sounds... people usually focus more on writing in the case of Japanese (and Chinese) because it uses a system which is completely different from our own. But if you're set on learning Japanese, you want to learn words by pronunciation, exactly as if you were studying Spanish.

I don't know if you're an English native speaker (I'm not), but I'd like to point out how inconsistent is the English writing system. It took the latin system, where each syllabe had a clear pronunciation and created monsters like the four-letter sequence "ough" (which can be read in a number of ways).

Sure, you'll also learn a lot of words reading, and figuring out how to pronounce those won't be easy as in Spanish... but if you're reading beginning material you'll have furigana on them if they're rare anough, while if you're already quite advanced you'll still be able to use a dictionary.

Kanji are not only good because they let you guess the meaning of a word you're reading, but also, from a learner point of view, because they fill of meaning words you've learned.
You learn for the first time that "fireworks" is said "hanabi", then you look at the kanji and you think "Wow! That's flower-fire! How cool is that?". And now you remember better both the pronunciation and the writing, because "hanabi" isn't anymore just a random group of sounds.

I've seen a lot of people in this forum that doesn't even bother to care too much about learning readings of each kanji, because you'll end up picking them up just by learning vocabulary. YMMV, but I think that the good thing of this approach is that people using thing remember the most important thing about kanji: kanji are connected to the MEANING of the world, and just to a much lesser extent to its pronunciation.

Knowing the readings of the kanji will make you better at guessing and remembering pronunciation, but even Japanese (and educated) people sometime misread words they don't know (or names)... if reading kanji phonetically doesn't work for them, why should it work for us?