Could you gently give me an average of the number of common onyomi (and possibly kunyomi) readings of the kanji used in core6000 (I don't know if they are exactly the same as the RtK1 kanji)?

I know some kanji have one onyomi while other have ten onyomi, but on average how many there are per kanji, if we include only the most common readings (let's say only those you'll encounter in core6000)?

Furthermore, it is possible to have a similar data about irregular readings? In other words, if we take core6000 as a point of reference, how many words there are with irregular readings? Where for irregular I don't mean lightly altered onyomi (千[ぜん] ; 八百[はっぴゃく] ; 喫茶店[きっさてん]) but things like 今日.

Another question xD when you study compounds, do you pay particular attention to the readings of every single kanji in that compound?

i.e.: when you learned 喫茶店 you look at the readings of every kanji like 喫＝きつ、茶＝さ、店＝てん, so きっさてん; or you simply try to memorize 喫茶店 = きっさてん as a whole? I think the benefits of the first approach are obvious from the moment the same readings will be re-used in other compounds, but I'm starting now to study compounds so maybe I'm wrong here.

Thank you in advance!!

I think you meant kun'yomi because no kanji can have ten on'yomi. They often have only one on'yomi. When they have two on'yomi it's often a variant (HAKU, BAKU; KAN, GAN...). So an average number of on'yumi will be roughly the same as your amount of kanji. To know the amount of kanji in your Anki deck, use the Japanese support plug-in (or was it the kanji support plug-in?).

As for your last question I can't see a good reason to learn きっさてん without differenciating the readings. What would happen when you will see 喫茶 or 茶店 alone? Of course you can infer, but sometimes it's not really obvious, and sounds counterproductive.

EratiK Wrote:Of course you can infer, but sometimes it's not really obvious

Sure but neither are things like rendaku and renjyou (eng wikipedia doesn't have a page) and gemination like in 喫茶店. I wouldn't describe that as a 'lightly altered' reading - it can be pretty drastic and the only way to guess correctly is seeing a lot of compounds

The number of kanji with multiple on'yomi that are actually in common use is fairly low. I think the one with the most is 納, which has 4 or 5, but more than 2 (in common use) is very rare. Kun'yomi are the ones that can proliferate.

Sometimes learning and studying kanji just seems so pointless.

I finished RTK1 some time ago and now I'm studying compounds and it suddenly hit me: why am I spending so much time on this? (I know why, to be able to read Japanese, but I mean philosophically).

I keep thinking I could be doing other things.

The novelty of learning kanji wears off very quickly.

Just last night I had dinner and there were some people from Japan with us and I asked the girl next to me (who has lived in North America for a year now in order to learn English) whether she's "forgetting her kanji". She didn't really answer my question but the conversation turned to a discussion of how maybe Japanese people are losing the skill of writing the kanji since they type in a word phonetically on their "device" and kanji pop up.

In fact the girl next to me showed me her hand held device and how she types the whole message in hiragana and the computer supplies the kanji. She mentioned that sometimes when she writes a message in a greeting card she writes all in hiragana. I didn't get the reason for that (her English wasn't very good).

I thought, if you're typing in a word phonetically and the computer supplies the kanji, then the question is, are your really using kanji or not?

End of story: after spending a few hours with some people from Japan and actually discussing kanji (and at one point we were writing some on a napkin*) for some reason my motivation to keep studying kanji didn't increase.

*side note: my dinner with these Japanese people really made me see the value of RTK1. As I wrote various kanji on my napkin I did it with complete confidence, all due to my working through RTK1. The person next to me's name included the kanji for "fond of" (woman + child). She wrote the kanji and I said "that means fond of". She said the meaning is similar to "love" and I said, I can write that one! I wrote thinking to myself the Heisig keywords "Birdhouse...heart...walking legs...."!

To the above poster: Well, if you don't care about being able to read, then it doesn't matter, right? I think you have a case of "once the novelty wears off, you lose interest" syndrome (not that it's a bad thing). I've heard about the kanji forgetting thing too, but it's tied to some of the lower frequency compounds. Conversely, I've also encountered people saying that the prevalence of technology has led to some of the more obscure kanji making a comeback (as opposed to hiragana usage), thanks to the ease of access. But I haven't really read any formal studies on it, so I'm not really knowledgeable.

You make it sound like you've never used Japanese input on a computer. There's no direct kanji input because no keyboard has 3000 keys. Not even hiragana input is used. The common form to write Japanese on a computer in Japan is to input romaji and have them converted automatically. Mainly because you can use the same layout for English too. You still have to select the correct kanji in the process though.

If you're studying how to write compounds per hand, it's solely for that purpose, to be able to write them per hand. Writing them on a computer you only need to be able to read the compound, no stroke order or anything necessary.

That's the main way kanji is written in Japan, and the Japanese are forgetting how to write more and more kanji themselves the longer they are out of school because hand writing just has no importance at all anymore.

Filosofically speaking it could be true, but being pragmatic, the fact is kanji are here and you must know them in order to read japanese... so... minna san thank for the clarifications and what about those irregular readings like kyou (sorry, no ime here)? How many there are out there?

cophnia61 Wrote:Furthermore, it is possible to have a similar data about irregular readings? In other words, if we take core6000 as a point of reference, how many words there are with irregular readings? Where for irregular I don't mean lightly altered onyomi (千[ぜん] ; 八百[はっぴゃく] ; 喫茶店[きっさてん]) but things like 今日.

Here's a list of official jukujikun.

Fun fact: 日本 にほん is an irregular reading: "に" isn't actually a reading of 日.

apirx Wrote:the Japanese are forgetting how to write more and more kanji themselves the longer they are out of school because hand writing just has no importance at all anymore.

That's a pity if true because in order to really remember the kanji I think you have to write them by hand.

I think I may have seen a bit of that at dinner when I was discussing kanji with the girl from Japan (the one who is here learning English).

We were flipping through my kanji book together ("A Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese" by Sakade et al.--I had it in my briefcase) looking for a certain kanji she had written on the napkin in the index. Suddenly, she triumphantly pointed to what she thought was the kanji we were looking for. But no! It was a different kanji. It looked at a glance like the one we were looking for, but one of the Heisig primitives was different. I was going to jokingly tell her "you need to go back and review your RTK1" LOL.

Kuzunoha13 Wrote:To the above poster: Well, if you don't care about being able to read, then it doesn't matter, right? I think you have a case of "once the novelty wears off, you lose interest" syndrome (not that it's a bad thing). I've heard about the kanji forgetting thing too, but it's tied to some of the lower frequency compounds. Conversely, I've also encountered people saying that the prevalence of technology has led to some of the more obscure kanji making a comeback (as opposed to hiragana usage), thanks to the ease of access. But I haven't really read any formal studies on it, so I'm not really knowledgeable.

It's not just the novelty wearing off, it's realizing that in the time I'm spending learning kanji readings I could probably learn three other languages (being sarcastic here). I was inputting data on on and kun readings in my Microsoft access database and it just hit me, is all this time spent really worth it?

Perhaps there should be a thread in this forum called "Encouragement for the disillusioned". Maybe having finished RTK1 I'm now going through a sort of "post-partum depression".

john555 Wrote:It's not just the novelty wearing off, it's realizing that in the time I'm spending learning kanji readings I could probably learn three other languages (being sarcastic here). I was inputting data on on and kun readings in my Microsoft access database and it just hit me, is all this time spent really worth it?

That's part of learning Japanese, unfortunately. I think some people do it by deluding themselves into the idea that kanji aren't hard to learn or don't take any more time than other languages (some even claim kanji make it easier than other languages). But if you have things you want to read in Japanese, let that motivate you.

john555 Wrote:We were flipping through my kanji book together ("A Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese" by Sakade et al.--I had it in my briefcase) looking for a certain kanji she had written on the napkin in the index. Suddenly, she triumphantly pointed to what she thought was the kanji we were looking for. But no! It was a different kanji. It looked at a glance like the one we were looking for, but one of the Heisig primitives was different. I was going to jokingly tell her "you need to go back and review your RTK1" LOL.

And the thing is she can still probably read advanced, kanji-crammed texts at a lightning pace because context is key. The other half of a jukugo is going to jog their memory of what that first one means, without them having to do it consciously. Hell I have read that it would probably be no problem even if the text has the wrong character but with the right reading/phonetic element! Apparently this sort of typo is even hard to proofread for because a good reader will just skim right past it.

john555 Wrote:I was inputting data on on and kun readings in my Microsoft access database and it just hit me, is all this time spent really worth it?

Not enough information to decide, but if it's something that can be accomplished by, say, modifying ryuujouji, then probably not.

john555 Wrote:That's a pity if true because in order to really remember the kanji I think you have to write them by hand.

I don't think that's true at all. I can read about 3000 kanji, but can write basically none of them. I think I remembered them just as well without writing them.

I only study vocabulary and the readings stick that way: you make the kanji-reading connection if you can remember how the word is written. This has the advantage of taking away the confusion of homonymy.

I'd only specifically study readings if you find that a kanji is particularly confusing and it trips you up sometimes. But never before realising it does trip you up.

apirx Wrote:

john555 Wrote:That's a pity if true because in order to really remember the kanji I think you have to write them by hand.

I don't think that's true at all. I can read about 3000 kanji, but can write basically none of them. I think I remembered them just as well without writing them.

Sorry what I meant by "remembering" was being able to produce them by writing as well as read them. For me personally I think unless I'm capable of writing a specific kanji I can never be sure whether in my reading I'm mixing up kanji by a single stroke.

john555 Wrote:Sorry what I meant by "remembering" was being able to produce them by writing as well as read them. For me personally I think unless I'm capable of writing a specific kanji I can never be sure whether in my reading I'm mixing up kanji by a single stroke.

Stroke orders and such are really only important for writing per hand. If you are mixing up kanji while reading, that is a problem that will go away with (a lot) more reading.