Different Ways to Read the Same Character in Japanese

One interesting aspect of Japanese is that its characters have readings both corresponding to the original Japanese words they represent, and the original Chinese pronunciation.

As you know if you study Japanese, or may have heard even if you don’t, there are multiple ways to read each character. This differs from Chinese where the characters in general only have one reading.

You can read a lot more on the topic in Tofugu’s extensive writeup here, but here’s the short version:

The Basics

In Japanese there are two basic ways to read most of the characters, namely the on’yomi and kun’yomi. The on’yomi is an approximation of the original Chinese reading (such as it were thousands of years ago when the characters were imported from China). The kun’yomi is the way the word was originally read in Japanese.

I think it often makes sense to compare the influence of Chinese on Japanese and Korean to that of Latin on the languages of western Europe.

Take the word “water”, for instance. You’ve got the English word for it, then you’ve got the Latin word “aqua”. So in this case, “water” would be the kun’yomi and “aqua” would be the on’yomi.

If you can pretend that Latin used logographic symbols like Chinese, which was then used to write English, we’d have a symbol that would be read either “water” or “aqua” depending on circumstance, and this is the situation Japanese is in.

Some other fun things that happen is that compound words in Japanese have a single Chinese character.

For instance, let’s pretend English was suddenly to be written with Chinese characters. In English “waterfall” is a compound word with a pretty obvious meaning. However, in Chinese and Japanese it’s a single character: 滝. So you might end up with a situation where the kun’yomi of a single character is actually not a single word at all!

One Japanese example of this is the word for thunder. In Chinese it has its own character 雷, but in Japanese it’s called “kaminari”, which roughly translates into “cry of the gods”, so that ended up becoming the kun’yomi for 雷.

Knowing Which to Use

There are some rules of thumb when it comes to these readings. A single character is often the kun’yomi, as will anything that has the Japanese-only phonetic kana alphabet attached. Multiple-character words consisting of only Chinese characters are typically on’yomi.

Like with Latin, the Chinese reading is also often a bit fancier, so it’s often this one that’s used in literary or academic words.

Sometimes you even find the same word in both forms! For instance “obtain” is 手に入れる (te ni ireru, literally insert into hand. I think this is a really cool word, actually!). both “te” and “ireru” are kun’yomi. But there’s also the slightly fancier 入手 (note that it’s the same Chinese characters being used, just in opposite order and without the Japanese grammatical stuff attached). This is read “nyuushu”, using the on’yomi instead!

Personally, I’ve never really bothered studying which reading is which, because this is a thing that also just comes with exposure… after a while certain readings just start to make more sense in multiple-character words for instance.