Hi!! I've been learning Japanese here and outside renshuu. But I have no idea what does Kunyomi and Onyomi mean next to kanji.. I suppose it may be something like how to read it. But why is one always typed white and one grey? Thanks for reading :]
Very roughly speaking, the Japanese borrowed the writing system (kanji) of the Chinese.
So, the Japanese needed to merge the spoken language with this new written language (kanji).
So, spoken words that existed in Japanese got attached to kanji with the same meanings, those readings became Kunyomi.
The words that they didn't already have, they "imitated" the Chinese reading, and that became the Onyomi.
If you have a word where there is hiragana after the kanji, it will almost always use the Kunyomi
e.g. 古い = ふる + い = ふるい. (A lot of verbs, and adjectives are like this and will use the kunyomi)
If you have a word made up of multiple kanji, it will often (not always) use the Onyomi.
e.g. 来月 = らい + げつ = らいげつ
Single kanji words usually use the Kunyomi (not always)
Usually a word with multiple kanji will only use the kunyomi or onyomi readings. But there are rare exceptions that use the kunyomi for some and onyomi for others.
If a reading is greyed out, it means you don't know the reading.
Kanji are characters from Chinese that were applied to the existing Japanese language, so there are both native Chinese & Japanese ways to read most of them.
Onyomi (literally sound-reading) is the borrowed Chinese reading of the character (or rather the Japanese phonetic approximation of the Chinese reading). Onyomi is usually used in compound words where multiple kanji combine to create the meaning.
Kunyomi are the native Japanese words for the concepts kanji represent, e.g. The word ひと means "person" and so does the character 人, so 人 has the kunyomi of ひと. Kanji read with kunyomi tend to appear by themself or with a hiragana suffix (called okurigana, which is the part of the reading that's in brackets is the dictionary).
The colour of the reading in the dictionary is just an indication of if Renshuu will quiz you about it, it's not related to the type of reading. I believe there's more information about how kanji works in the Japanese Basics section of Renshuu's menu.
