I am beginning to learn Kanji readings now. Having searched around the net a few places I figured it might be easier to ask a couple basic questions here as someone is bound to have a pointer to the relevant information.

Example that is bothering me:

student -> がくせい -> 学生

My dictionary has essentially the above as the entry. Where can I learn about the pronunciation for a compound kanji. Is the first character gaku, and the second sei. And further more, is there a resource which takes the guessing out of this?

I hope i portrayed the basic problem i am facing

Thanks!
Noah

There's a set list of readings for individual kanji that are in compounds, and each kanji has just one of those sounds. I don't have access to a good list right now but I'm sure there are some out there. Also, if you use firefox rikaichan will show you readings when hovering over a compound, and if you hit shift you can see different readings each individual kanji can have.

For your example, 学生　is がく・せい

Wakan's character list can filter by clipboard, so you could copy your compound and then go to Wakan and look up the readings of each character, as well as see what words it appears in, pretty quickly.

I worried about which kanji had which reading when I started learning sentences. I asked around and people said that after a while you start to just know. It does seem to be working too.

For the example of 学生　－　がくせい. If you just learn that then you can't be sure what's with what. But as you get further in your studies you might come across 先生　－　せんせい. It doesn't take much to realise that that the common kanji to both words is 生 with the reading せい. Therefore you know that 先 must be せん and 学 must be がく. They build on each other, so I say don't worry about it and keep ploughing on...

nwatkins Wrote:I am beginning to learn Kanji readings now. Having searched around the net a few places I figured it might be easier to ask a couple basic questions here as someone is bound to have a pointer to the relevant information.

Example that is bothering me:

student -> ???? -> ??

My dictionary has essentially the above as the entry. Where can I learn about the pronunciation for a compound kanji. Is the first character gaku, and the second sei. And further more, is there a resource which takes the guessing out of this?

I hope i portrayed the basic problem i am facing

Thanks!
Noah

Get a character dictionary... Since when did such things stop being common sense?!

Serge Wrote:Get a character dictionary... Since when did such things stop being common sense?!

You can also use Jim Breen's WWWJDIC. Look up the word you're interested in, then click on the "examine" button to look at the characters individually.

You can also use JWPce to look up words and kanji. You can look up a word and then right click to get information on it. It's faster and more handy than a web site.

Thanks a lot. All of this helps a lot. Hopefully some other people get a benefit from my stupidity

uberstuber Wrote:There's a set list of readings for individual kanji that are in compounds, and each kanji has just one of those sounds. I don't have access to a good list right now but I'm sure there are some out there. Also, if you use firefox rikaichan will show you readings when hovering over a compound, and if you hit shift you can see different readings each individual kanji can have.

For your example, 学生　is がく・せい

I just downloaded rikaichan and it's pretty awesome ^^ Thank you!

I have one question though.
Where can I get a list that tells me the meaning of the word's function like (P) (n-suf) (pref) (s,m,f) (adj,oK) (v1,vi) and so on?

Have a look at this:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjd...l#code_tag

You can kill two birds with one stone by reading something with yomigana. That way you learn everything in context.

synewave Wrote:Have a look at this:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjd...l#code_tag

Thank you Exactly as I wanted