hello everyone!

i'm learning japanese by myself for now more then 2 years by immersing myself and by learning vocabulary though sentences. i actually never learned any radicals, nor did i learn the reading of the single kanji. because mostly, i learn like this. For example, i learn:
天使、使う、使用、・・ after a while, i know automatically that the reading of the kanji 使 is し and つか. i did that for a while and its good so far.

i often find myself knowing how to read words i never saw before/never learned. its quite cool since reading is that think what i mostly forget.

so i'm thinking recently if i should put more focus into single kanji reading and learn it active, so i can guess more words.

Do you guys learn the on and kun reading active or with words?

thank you

*if i have any gramatically mistakes, sorry for that, i'm not a english native*

You have learned it the way which is recommended by most people here, that is with words. I wouldn't change a thing.

synetic707 Wrote:so i'm thinking recently if i should put more focus into single kanji reading and learn it active, so i can guess more words.

Do you guys learn the on and kun reading active or with words?

I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Can you re-word your question?
It sounds like what you're doing is great. You see kanji and you know the meaning/pronunciation because you have noticed patterns. Regardless, changing your regimen can be useful/fun because it lets you see the language in new ways.

I've never once specifically studied readings for kanji and it's never really caused me any problems. A quick check of my decks shows ~1400 kanji in my seen cards, so I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to learn all the common kanji this way. The only thing that will get you is place names with weird readings, but that kills Japanese people too so no worries there.

tashippy Wrote:

synetic707 Wrote:so i'm thinking recently if i should put more focus into single kanji reading and learn it active, so i can guess more words.

Do you guys learn the on and kun reading active or with words?

I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Can you re-word your question?
It sounds like what you're doing is great. You see kanji and you know the meaning/pronunciation because you have noticed patterns. Regardless, changing your regimen can be useful/fun because it lets you see the language in new ways.

yeah i'm doing fine, i learn every day new words and sometimes, i can guess the reading of a words i don't know just by looking at the kanjis. but if i could learn the reading of all the jouyou kanjis, i don't have to actually learn the reading of the word, since i can guess by the reading of all the kanjis from the compound word.

for example, i could read 無愛想 (ぶ、あい、そう), if i learn every reading from all the kanjis, i could guess the reading of every word right?

I really don't see any value in studying readings in isolation from words. What you're doing sounds great.

Yes, I did learn the dominant "on" reading(s) for every character while doing RTK.

The benefit, as you correctly conjecture, is that you can guess the reading of compound
kanji words more than 90% of the time, no matter how complex they may look like, for instance "鎖骨下動脈", "血痕検出", "絆創膏", or "顕微鏡検査". However, since exceptions are unpredictable ("割合"), you must still check all words in the dictionary if you see them for the first time, which is not a big hassle with today's technology.

Just to give you an idea, I am currently reading a Japanese novel - in the first chapter, I found about 400 new words, of which about 70 were new "kun".

This streamlines your study nicely: it is only necessary to pay a special attention to the 70 kun, while the other compounds, being predictable, are simply reviewed by re-reading the chapter, or by using passive recognition cards in Anki.

Kun can be surprising hard to learn. I have a list of long kun I keep on forgetting, such as "chirakaru", "yurameku", etc. I think I know them, then two weeks later, poof, they're gone, forgotten. However, I can accurately recall a ridiculously specialized word like "鎖骨下動脈" (sub-clavicular artery) just by recalling its individual kanji.