HI,
I am a beginner in Japanese, I do not understand the different readings offered in the dictionary on lingQ, Can someone please explain?
Thank you
Chinese characters were adopted by the Japanese who didn’t had their own writing system back at the day. By doing so they essentially did two things:
- They adopted terms and their writing for stuff that was brought to the japanese culture by the Chinese, similar to how the English adopted the word chavallery by the French, or the Latin term schola (school). Obviously the phonetics differ from the original one. These are the ON readings.
- Chinese symbols were used to write down words already existent in Japanese. In this case, only the semantics matter, and the same symbol may appear in different words that share similarities in meaning, but not phonetics, thus resulting in a sometimes high count of different readings. These are the KUN readings.
Due to this you have several readings of the Kanji. However, it is probably best to learn the words and their pronounciation instead of trying to memorize all readings for one Kanji from scratch.
That beeing said others who are actually learning Japanese for some time - I only dipped into it a bit - might provide a more complete and useful overview. I hope I could help you nevertheless.
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