掲示板 Forums - Struggling with onyomi vs kunyomi, advice?

I'm almost 2 months into learning Japanese and I decided to learn some kanji on the side to speed up my reading process, but I keep getting stuck on onyomi vs kunyomi questions in the kanji quizzes. My reasoning seems super flawed because I always pick the wrong answers, so I must have something mixed up? Is there a secret to differentiating between onyomi and kunyomi at a glance?

A guideline. with many exceptions, is:

- Kunyomi is the sound for kanji when they are used in verbs, and adjectives, and when single kanji are used as nouns.

- Onyomi is the sound for kanji when they are use combined with other kanji

So, if you recognize the kanji from any vocab you have used, you can use that.

For beginning kanji:

If you know the counting numbers 一つ, 二つ, etc. those are the kunyomi readings, the others are onyomi

If you know the days of the week, those are using the onyomi readings

If you had to just guess entirely based on the reading whether it was kunyomi or onyomi or not, some very very loose guidelines with many exceptions are:

-The convention is to write onyomi in katakana and kunyomi in hiragana, so if that convention is followed, it's a dead give away

- If it ends in an ん it is probably onyomi

- Most onyomi are typically 1 or 2 syllables (not to be confused with mora), and if it has a second syllable it is usually き、く or つ

-If it has more than one syllable and any of the syllables rhyme with あ it is probably kunyomi

These guidelines are just from my own personal observation. I didn't do any statistical analysis to create them, so take it with a grain of salt.

I agree about waiting on doing the onyomi vs kunyomi questions until you have studied the readings quite a bit. The more you study, the more you'll recognize the types of sounds onyomi make. For instance, しょう、じょう、きょう、and so on, as well as し、じ、きん、こん、and more. Kunyomi make up lots of dictionary verb forms, like はし.る、か.える、and so on.

If you look at the Kanji Kensei lessons from the learning center (start with 10 and work backwards to 1), the kanji are mostly grouped by onyomi readings (multiple kanji with the same onyomi readings). That might help you start to recognize what onyomi readings sound like and how to differentiate them from kunyomi.