As a rule, I have context sentences for all my Anki vocabulary. When I'm making a new card, I do try to pay careful attention to whether or not 開く and 入る have the right furigana on the back side, and add correct readings for numbers and so on, as a step towards solving this problem.

Also, of course, any listening/reading you can do with matching dialogue and text will help with these patterns.

You could also check the dictionary entries for each word and add example sentences from there to your vocab or sentence SRS.

JapaneseRuleOf7 wrote:

By the way, most kanji frequently use two readings

Yes, but the examples the OP was citing in particular are those that are indistinguishable even in context. The only way to know the 'correct' reading is  to know what someone -would- say in that situation, as opposed to にゅう for 入　which only appears in compounds. That is 入る can only be いる or はいる, never にゅうる.

Those three sets of words (開, 入, 止) are, I think, somewhat unique in that respect, although the reverse often happens, ie, かえない could be any number of words with any number of kanji spellings. 

I have a similar problem with numbers, although those -are- deterministic, if only you know the rules for every counter-word you might encounter, which is only challenging in being tedious to study.

There's also a somewhat larger set of kanji-compound words where there's more than one valid reading, sometimes with an very similar or identical meaning. I don't really know how to cope with -those- very well except by paying attention to what I hear.

Last edited by SomeCallMeChris (2013 March 31, 12:10 am)

SomeCallMeChris wrote:

JapaneseRuleOf7 wrote:

By the way, most kanji frequently use two readings

Yes, but the examples the OP was citing in particular are those that are indistinguishable even in context.

It sounds like we're then talking about transitive/intransitive verb pairs ( http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/ti_list.html ).  And doesn't the context help to distinguish them?

彼はドアを開けます。　[あける]
ドアが開きます。　      [あく]

In which case sentences could help to memorize the correct reading.  Or am I missing something?

Thanks for clarifying that with examples.  I see the problem now. 

So couldn't this be addressed with Anki?

Front of card:

このシャツは気に入る。

Back of card:

このシャツは気[き]に入る[いる]。

(Use the Japanese add-on and it'll appear with furigana.)

You could probably knock out those three kanji with a few sentences each.  What do you think?

Stansfield123 wrote:

You're wrong, it will (I have experience with learning languages without formal study, and it works just fine). There's no way you're gonna confuse iru and hairu after 10 years of reading.

You could sprinkle in the occasional audio book. Or watch some television. Or meet ONE Japanese person. But I would bet anything that if you learn the rest, it would be impossible for you to not also learn this small part of Japanese. I don't think you could avoid it even if you tried. If reading is working for you (as in you're enjoying the process), I wouldn't change a thing.

Eventually you will have to familiarize yourself with a more casual/spoken style of Japanese than what you find in novels, but that's such an easy, natural process that it's not worth worrying about.

I don't know about this.  Obviously if it's a really common word like 気に入る you can pick it up through hearing it and not misread it as はいる, but if they're less common words they may not have furigana in any texts so you can pick up the reading of it wrong.  I know that whenever I have to read something out loud I find out a bunch of stuff I learned wrong (just recently I had to correct 主とする; I had always read that as おも but apparently it's しゅ instead -- being a mostly written form I hadn't heard or noticed it spoken or read aloud).

Have you tried subs2srs? It is a program for creating cards from tv shows or movies. Depending on the settings, you get cards with text, audio, image, and even video.

Once you have processed a few episodes, you can search for the collection for the words you have difficulties with and learn those cards. The audio will ensure you get the correct reading and the image/video will tell you the context it was used in.

I see omotosuru in google results too. I guess one should chiebukuro it maybe

And I wouldn't necessary trust a google search for 主とする since it's used primarily in formal written style, so while most Japanese people would know what it means they may not have heard it spoken very often or used it in speech themselves.  If おもとする were a common phrase to hear in speech I would say that you can read it either way but since this is primarily written formal style I think you should stick closer to what is prescriptively correct.

Context, context and more context. And by context I mean not just a short sentence to play around with, I mean the situational context - the clues are more often than not there. If you have been reading for several years - this should by now be almost a non-issue for kanji for commonly used verbs. All of their most commonly occuring forms would be down pat by now to even a light reader (general non technical Japanese) of say 5 years experience.

I don't think there is any more detailed answer to this - that is not to disparage the problem since it is a very real one. We have all had the same problem, and we must all have had the experience a few steps down the road whe we look back at a kanji or set of vocab that we previously got confused over and thought 'what was all that about?' Read more, speak more, listen more and the more familar with the way that Japanese is actually used on a day to day to basis, and these confusions should lessen.