As I'm wrapping up my trip to Japan I've been delighted at the gift that RtK Lite has given me - the ability to look at a lot of the written material around me and and translate them into keywords. This is much better than what I had before.

But I get frustrated that with my friends I keep on mispronouncing things. Whether it's ads, station names, whatever - I often take a guess at the pronunication and it's almost always wrong. This is related to my frustration in learning pronunciations of vocabulary. I can't seem to figure out the underlying system myself, and so it's just random if I get it right or not.

I was in a bookstore recently in the JLPT section and stumbled across this book, which seems like it will perfectly address both of these (related) problems:

新完全マスター漢字 日本語能力試験N3

It seems to have a systematic study of the on and kun readings of the kanji. And it's written at a level where I think I can pretty much read it without the translations. Lots of exercises.

I'm guessing that there are other people out there in the same boat, so I thought I'd share. Although the audience on this forum skews towards the advanced level, so it might also be old hat to a lot of you.

I'll probably start it after I finish learning the writing of all the N3 kanji.

Yea, that series is fantastic. They also make a series of wonderful grammar books.

RandomQuotes Wrote:Yea, that series is fantastic. They also make a series of wonderful grammar books.

Do you think it's worth picking up the earlier levels (N5 and N4) to learn what they have to say about the easier kanji?

Hahah, I just checked and the books only start at N3. Nevermind...

I use the N2 and N1 for grammar study, and have also used their 聴解 books. Highly recommended.

Quote:This is related to my frustration in learning pronunciations of vocabulary. I can't seem to figure out the underlying system myself, and so it's just random if I get it right or not.

I don't think there is any underlying system? Or if there is, there isn't any consistent underlying system that you can 'figure out' - the only thing is knowing enough words so that you can make informed guesses about similar looking words with the same kanji in them. But that's not really a system, it's just knowing lots of words. It's not uncommon for Japanese people to have to make random guesses at unfamiliar place names and such.

I don't know about the book, but if it teaches you lots of words I'm sure it's useful

Aikynaro Wrote:

Quote:This is related to my frustration in learning pronunciations of vocabulary. I can't seem to figure out the underlying system myself, and so it's just random if I get it right or not.

I don't think there is any underlying system? Or if there is, there isn't any consistent underlying system that you can 'figure out' - the only thing is knowing enough words so that you can make informed guesses about similar looking words with the same kanji in them. But that's not really a system, it's just knowing lots of words. It's not uncommon for Japanese people to have to make random guesses at unfamiliar place names and such.

I don't know about the book, but if it teaches you lots of words I'm sure it's useful

The is somewhat of an underlying system. For about half the jouyou kanji, the onyomi is given by the phonetic half of the kanji. Japanese children are taught this in schools (I have seen it). It only works for about half of them in the jouyou set, at my guess because I can't be bothered looking it up right now, and a proportion of them have a sound change, but you can learn those ones in a systematic way to reduce the information burden. If you include non-jouyou kanji, the percentage goes up to about 60-70%, iirc.