This was probably already covered somewhere, I did a search but couldn't find it.

I'm going through RTK 1 right now and am at around 550 learned Kanji.

This means that in japanese sentences I do recognize some Kanji, in which case I often can attribute at least some kind of meaning to it, having learned the basic Keywords with the Kanji.

However, if I don't know a particular word then in most cases I have no idea on how to pronounce it.

So at what point would some of you advanced learners suggest to learn On'Yomi and Kun'Yomi readings for Kanji? Should I start right now, or go through the rest of RTK1 first and not worry about it much?

In many cases there are more than 2 ways to pronounce a respective Kanji correctly, so I don't want to overwhelm myself and actually slow down my progress by starting to learn Yomi at this point.

I'm not sure which way to go out about this, so if more experienced learners have advice I'd really appreciate it.
Thank you!

Hmm, well, if RTK is the first thing you're doing in Japanese, or one of the first things, I wouldn't worry about it. Something can be said for the approach of doing RTK before you do anything else, although that's nothing like the path I followed.

I wouldn't worry about learning kunyomi and onyomi until your Japanese is good enough that you can make that judgement for yourself. Basically, start learning vocabulary and grammar with whatever method you like (I'd recommend getting a good textbook and maybe reinforcing stuff with anki), and you'll learn the kanji that go along with the vocabulary. Afterwords you can decide whether you want to systematically learn kunyomi or onyomi at all. I personally never did, I just read a lot and studied some vocab and eventually got good enough to read novels and stuff. I'm aware of some of the kunyomi or onyomi for every frequently used kanji, but I never studied them in an organized way.

It would be an awful idea to learn kunyomi and onyomi right from the beginning of your Japanese studies--it's a complete waste of time. You need to get grammar and basic vocab (2000ish words) down first.

Tzadeck,

thanks, that already helps! Well I never said I didn't do anything besides RTK - for the last 3 months I also worked with several textbooks and methods (Tae Kim, Genki, MT Audio) and with Anki, for about 2-4 hours on most days.
So I probably can pronounce like a couple of hundred words with Kanji.

It's just that I learned about the concept of Yomi, and always wondered whether by not learning it early on I was missing out on something really important.

I'm glad if it that's not the case, cause I'd rather follow a path of simply reading more and more "real" japanese texts, gradually increasing difficulty.

If knowing Yomi isn't necessarily a great help with that I'm only glad. It's not that there isn't 10,000 other things I have to learn about the japanese language!　笑笑

thanks!

maxwell777 Wrote:If knowing Yomi isn't necessarily a great help with that I'm only glad.

Even if each kanji had a single reading it would *still* be best (i.e. easiest) to learn the readings in context.

Given the complexity of their usage in Japanese there really is no other choice.

In some bothersome and unfortunately common cases even the context of a complete word isn't enough to pin down the reading and you have to resort to grammar/semantics, e.g.

方 = かた or ほう?

入る = いる or はいる?

止める = とめる or やめる?

避ける = さける or よける?

留める = とめる or とどめる?

... and many more (some easier than others).

Another confounding and highly bothersome factor is the pronunciation changes (こく -> ごく etc).

The tendency is to associate each kanji with a word it commonly appears in and use that as a basis for guessing the readings of new words (and names).

Knowing that 人 can be read にん or じん or ひと is the easy part. Knowing *when* is where the 'fun' starts.

anotherjohn,

yes, that makes a lot of sense to me.

however, could you give an example with a whole sentence where i.E. "止める = とめる or やめる?" _cannot_ be guessed within the context?

I thought the difference between these were clear to me, "とめる" meaning someting like stopping or staying in a place, while　"やめる" means something like to stop or quite an action.

Am I wrong?

maxwell777 Wrote:however, could you give an example with a whole sentence where i.E. "止める = とめる or やめる?" _cannot_ be guessed within the context?

By "the context of a complete word isn't enough" I meant a word as a context for kanji, not a sentence as a context for a word.

anotherjohn Wrote:

maxwell777 Wrote:however, could you give an example with a whole sentence where i.E. "止める = とめる or やめる?" _cannot_ be guessed within the context?

By "the context of a complete word isn't enough" I meant a word as a context for kanji, not a sentence as a context for a word.

okay, I see.