12 ms·

It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not mor

by Laaas 4y ago

It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English. The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation. There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are several things it could mean, but this isn't really any different from _all_ languages. Given any sentence, there are multiple possible meanings, and we have to disambiguate depending on context. This is true even for sentences like "The man is here", which man? The part about complexity is less "ambiguity", and more "how much headspace do you need for the language". I'm not sure if Japanese is more complex than English in that regard, but I do want to note that 1) pronunciation is very straightforward 2) it's *very* hard to make spelling mistakes 3) there are very few irregular words. Especially point 2 is quite important IMO. If you look at rates of dyslexia, you'll see that they're much less in countries that use Chinese characters. Interestingly, many Japanese people whom I know, who have no issue spelling in Japanese, show the very common signs of dyslexia when spelling in English. I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible.

ickoonite 4y ago
I think it’s quite hard to argue that Japanese orthography is harder to fuck up than English. Mastery involves distinguishing between 人 and 入, 鐘 and 鍾, 撤 and 徹, amongst countless other very similar characters. It is not easy at all - significant mistakes are just a slip of the pen away. Phonetic syllabaries like hiragana may eliminate spelling mistakes, insofar as such a thing could be conceived of in Japanese, but the same is largely true of Spanish, which manages to achieve orthographic consistency while using the same letters as we do.
makeitdouble 4y ago
I think parent’s use of ”logical” instead of “complex” better fits the bill. For instance, on the 1 onyomi with 1 kunyomi average, there’s no specific logic making it that way (I actually doubt it’s only one of each in average), and there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them. It’s not a problem in practice because not knowing most words’ reading has little impact in day to day life, and mixing up kanjis is pretty common and people won’t make a fuss about it. All in all I think Japanese has a very steady learning curve where other languages will have sudden walls to climb, but it’s not more or less complex, difficulty is just more evenly distributed.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  > there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them. Precisely! It is insane. Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other. Furigana are essential for karaoke.
  - philsnow 4y ago
    > Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other. This is intensely interesting -- do I understand this correctly, that what happens is a songwriter uses a verb (or I guess any word) and writes it down as a different set of kanji(+kana) than how it's usually written, and the new form is confusing at first to a reader of the lyrics, and the new form evokes some different emotion or context because of the choice of kanji? Can you think of an example? I want to see for myself. Wordplay is delicious and I've never heard of this kind of it. . o O ( this had better not awaken anything in me. )
    - DapperZoom 4y ago
      I'm not familiar with many Japanese song lyrics, so not familiar with the phenomenon mentioned. I'd also be interested in examples. There are always several ways to write a word in Japanese. As far as I know, any word can be written in hiragana. Additionally, there are the kanji writing and then katakana. While katakana is primarily used for words that were appropriated from other languages, it has several other common uses. For example, if a robot, alien, child, or non-Japanese is speaking, the words may be written in katakana to indicate the non-fluency of the speaker. Also, many animal names are often written in katakana. Additionally, there are quite a few pseudo-English words that are written in katakana because they originally arose from English words. Some of my favorites (written in romaji for those who don't read katakana): - "baabeekaa" : pronounced similar to "baby car", this word means a stroller - "akogi" : short for acoustic guitar - "brappi", "jimihen", etc: Brad Pitt, Jimi Hendrix, etc. - "handoru": pronounced similar to "handle". This is what a steering wheel is called in Japanese, so.. - "handorukeepaa": or handle keeper, refers to a designated driver. Another interesting thing that occurs in Japanese is referred to as ateji. This is where kanji are used only for the sound they give. In other words, any word can be written by just using a kanji with that sound for each syllable. The meanings of the kanji chosen (there are many with each particular sound) can give additional flavor/wordplay/signifigance to the usage. Finally, one of the most interesting things I saw in Japanese was a baby soap, called "Arau baby". The first word "arau" is the Japanese infinitive for "to wash" written in romaji, or roman script. Since this is the product name and it is written in roman script, the product label also includes a katakana translation (アラウベビー). So instead of using the kanji for arau, it was treated as a foreign word and then appropriated back into Japanese using katakana. Or something.
barking_biscuit 4y ago
>The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation. There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are several things it could mean, but this isn't really any different from _all_ languages. What the heck...? It's most definitely a problem in practice! That problem becomes pretty obvious once you get a vocabulary of around 10k ~ 15k words and you read both fiction and non-fiction books. What you find is that every time you encounter an unfamiliar word you only really have a best guess at how to read it and you actually can't be 100% sure. This has repeatedly been my experience. I spent some time thinking about if I could shortcut this process by instead simply learning all the "exceptions to the rule" but what I discovered is that the volume of them is too large for that to be a tractable approach.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  Precisely. The feeling I am getting from this discussion is there are quite a few people who have dabbled in the spoken language without having to grapple with its intractable writing system but consider themselves experts regardless. Anyone who looks at English and Japanese and finds them to be of equivalent complexity probably isn’t qualified to comment on either.
- Laaas 4y ago
  For such cases I find that the pronunciation _doesn't matter_. The meaning still comes across.
  - camdez 4y ago
    I struggle to see how this "doesn't matter" while also agreeing with you that it's a super cool property. Especially for someone coming from an alphabetic language background. Logograms allow you to understand (some) meaning without understanding pronunciation. Syllabaries and alphabets allow you to understand pronunciation (to varying degrees of success depending on spelling consistency) without necessarily understanding meaning. It's all tradeoffs. These days I read Chinese much better than Japanese, and it's definitely fun that I can look at a page full of Japanese and understand the meaning of many words just from knowing the (largely parallel) meaning of the kanji / Hanzi from Chinese. Conversely, I can read (the sounds of) Hangul, but I rightly know about 20 Korean words, so it's all just sounds to me. But I can read the name off of a Korean hotel sign and communicate it to a Korean taxi driver. I can't do the same in Japan if I don't know the pronunciation, even if I know exactly what the sign means. If it affects your ability to use the language effectively to achieve what you want then I think it matters.
tshaddox 4y ago
Aren't you just pointing out that fluent speakers don't often have a problem communicating? Surely that's true for any language, almost tautologically (they would have changed the language, even unintentionally, if there were major problems).
pezezin 4y ago
> I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible. They don't transpose the strokes, they just forget how to write the character entirely, even if they can read it perfectly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia I live in Japan and I have seen it happen many times, suddenly the person needs to stop and check the character in their phone or a dictionary. I have never seen it happens with an alphabet-based language. Sure, you might not be 100% sure about the spelling, but you can always approximate it and write something. Every single Japanese person who I know has told me how much a pain in the ass their language is to read and write, and how they wish it was simpler, but shoganai.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  Mao tried to simplify Chinese and frankly Mao didn't go far enough.
  - ickoonite 4y ago
    They actually tried to do a second round in the 1970s. It was felt that they had gone too far so it was abandoned, but not before some people had changed their surnames to use the new simplifications (e.g. 傅 became 付). Some never changed back.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      I love how ` basically becomes 'yadda yadda yadda' for the entire middle of 傅
      - ickoonite 4y ago
        In the first round of simplifications, 義 became 义, which is perhaps one of the most egregious ones that has stuck.
justusw 4y ago
I was working on an import/data conversion task for a Japanese accounting software. I always assumed importing was じゅにゅう, but it is actually うけいれ (受入). Much to my amusement I found out I have been saying breastfeeding (授乳) instead of importing. Theoretically both are readings for the same Kanji, but by convention, a lot of compound verbs are read using kun-yomi instead. Anyway, I hope my tax lawyer still was able to understand what I was trying to communicate? Prepare for people being too polite to point out mistakes. Also sometimes 受入 is written 受け入れ instead! And 支払い can be 支払. It is really confusing. Knowing all these nuances is difficult if you are looking to just use simple rules here and there.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  読み込む is probably more common for “import” (and 書き出す for “export”). But differences abound. Windows uses 印刷 for print (or did last time I checked); the Mac has long used プリント。And for connoisseurs of truly subtle differences, ウィンドウ on Windows contrasts with ウインドウ on the Mac.
  - justusw 4y ago
    Yeah, 読込 is a common way of saying importing too. The particular offender I am using here is called 会計王22 ;) Although using an app released in 2022 in Windows Shift_JIS compatibility mode is giving me less than regal feelings. /s Accounting Japanese is another whole weird world of unusual Japanese, such as 支払手数料 (payment fees) suddenly applying to all kinds of non-fee things as well such as professional services. One should keep in mind here that IT Japanese uses Japanese in places you won’t expect, and when you expect it even less, it will switch back to English.
    - getoj 4y ago
      支払手数料 is “fees paid” rather than “payment fees” - compare 支払利息 and 支払報酬. I’ve never noticed the ambiguity but your confusion is natural. I agree that it’s very strange that professional services fall under 手数料 instead of 報酬, but taxes are weird in every language.
Zababa 4y ago
> It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English Anecdotal, but considering how often I see Japanese people have small struggles with their own language compared to British or American people, I think it is more complex than English.
- porknubbins 4y ago
  I’m not sure how to measure complexity but after a long time with both languages I have found Japanese has a lot of gaps where there is no word matching an English word and fewer in the other direction. I thought I was bad at Japanese but then I heard things like “get suru” or “stay shita”.
- rjh29 4y ago
  English people very much have trouble with spelling, pronunciation and grammar as well. The spelling and pronunciation rules are at least as complex as kanji. (At least we don't have to write kanji, though...)
iopq 4y ago
This is just not true let's take something very basic, the kanji 人 has two on'yomi pronunciations, jin and nin and there's no way to tell which one to use without knowing ALL of the words it will be used in 日本人 - nihonjin, so far so good 三人 - sannin, okay, I guess there's two pronunciations 二人 - futari, huh? 一人 - hitori, wat so please tell me how I am supposed to know 人生 (jinsei) from 人気 (ninki) from 恋人 (koibito) from 大人 (otona) even ignoring the irregular reading for "adult" there's still no way to tell those three readings apart in a kanji as basic as person
- ickoonite 4y ago
  Precisely. A couple more: 隼人 (hayato), 盗人 (nusutto). Or we could enumerate the pronunciations of 日: 日々、日曜日 (which is top-tier insane), 日本、春日、本日、明日、明後日、今日 (take your pick which one I mean), 昨日 (ditto), 一日 (ditto), 二日、十四日〜十五日、二十日〜二十一日｡｡｡ One can marvel at its complexity - relish it even - but one cannot deny it.
- wst_ 4y ago
  I think taking sides in this debate is pointless. Languages are always as difficult as far they are from your mother tongue or other languages you know. Your question about the reading, though, has quite a simple answer. It's pretty obvious how to read all the examples given when you look at them as words, not a single character. Kanji does not exist in a vacuum. 人気 is "ninki" and 大人 is "otona" - no other way around it. Combination of those characters, usually, have one and only reading. To tell the truth, in English, people are unconsciously reading words as a whole, too.
  - iopq 4y ago
    Great, so what is 大人気? if it's 大人気ない it's probably childish, but if it's not in that context, it's probably very popular You need to finish reading the whole SENTENCE to be able to pronounce it
    - wst_ 4y ago
      Not sure I agree with that. It's not difficult to notice one has "nai", other don't. Also when you read it in actual sentence you can immediately notice that something is wrong when you choose the wrong reading. Subsequent words don't add up. I am not saying confusion doesn't occur. I'm just saying it's not as big as people are painting it.
flippinburgers 4y ago
Japanese is vastly more difficult than English.

by Laaas 4y ago

ickoonite 4y ago

I think it’s quite hard to argue that Japanese orthography is harder to fuck up than English. Mastery involves distinguishing between 人 and 入, 鐘 and 鍾, 撤 and 徹, amongst countless other very similar characters. It is not easy at all - significant mistakes are just a slip of the pen away. Phonetic syllabaries like hiragana may eliminate spelling mistakes, insofar as such a thing could be conceived of in Japanese, but the same is largely true of Spanish, which manages to achieve orthographic consistency while using the same letters as we do.

makeitdouble 4y ago

I think parent’s use of ”logical” instead of “complex” better fits the bill. For instance, on the 1 onyomi with 1 kunyomi average, there’s no specific logic making it that way (I actually doubt it’s only one of each in average), and there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them. It’s not a problem in practice because not knowing most words’ reading has little impact in day to day life, and mixing up kanjis is pretty common and people won’t make a fuss about it. All in all I think Japanese has a very steady learning curve where other languages will have sudden walls to climb, but it’s not more or less complex, difficulty is just more evenly distributed.

ickoonite 4y ago
> there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them. Precisely! It is insane. Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other. Furigana are essential for karaoke.
- philsnow 4y ago
  > Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other. This is intensely interesting -- do I understand this correctly, that what happens is a songwriter uses a verb (or I guess any word) and writes it down as a different set of kanji(+kana) than how it's usually written, and the new form is confusing at first to a reader of the lyrics, and the new form evokes some different emotion or context because of the choice of kanji? Can you think of an example? I want to see for myself. Wordplay is delicious and I've never heard of this kind of it. . o O ( this had better not awaken anything in me. )
  - DapperZoom 4y ago
    I'm not familiar with many Japanese song lyrics, so not familiar with the phenomenon mentioned. I'd also be interested in examples. There are always several ways to write a word in Japanese. As far as I know, any word can be written in hiragana. Additionally, there are the kanji writing and then katakana. While katakana is primarily used for words that were appropriated from other languages, it has several other common uses. For example, if a robot, alien, child, or non-Japanese is speaking, the words may be written in katakana to indicate the non-fluency of the speaker. Also, many animal names are often written in katakana. Additionally, there are quite a few pseudo-English words that are written in katakana because they originally arose from English words. Some of my favorites (written in romaji for those who don't read katakana): - "baabeekaa" : pronounced similar to "baby car", this word means a stroller - "akogi" : short for acoustic guitar - "brappi", "jimihen", etc: Brad Pitt, Jimi Hendrix, etc. - "handoru": pronounced similar to "handle". This is what a steering wheel is called in Japanese, so.. - "handorukeepaa": or handle keeper, refers to a designated driver. Another interesting thing that occurs in Japanese is referred to as ateji. This is where kanji are used only for the sound they give. In other words, any word can be written by just using a kanji with that sound for each syllable. The meanings of the kanji chosen (there are many with each particular sound) can give additional flavor/wordplay/signifigance to the usage. Finally, one of the most interesting things I saw in Japanese was a baby soap, called "Arau baby". The first word "arau" is the Japanese infinitive for "to wash" written in romaji, or roman script. Since this is the product name and it is written in roman script, the product label also includes a katakana translation (アラウベビー). So instead of using the kanji for arau, it was treated as a foreign word and then appropriated back into Japanese using katakana. Or something.

barking_biscuit 4y ago

>The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation. There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are several things it could mean, but this isn't really any different from _all_ languages. What the heck...? It's most definitely a problem in practice! That problem becomes pretty obvious once you get a vocabulary of around 10k ~ 15k words and you read both fiction and non-fiction books. What you find is that every time you encounter an unfamiliar word you only really have a best guess at how to read it and you actually can't be 100% sure. This has repeatedly been my experience. I spent some time thinking about if I could shortcut this process by instead simply learning all the "exceptions to the rule" but what I discovered is that the volume of them is too large for that to be a tractable approach.

ickoonite 4y ago
Precisely. The feeling I am getting from this discussion is there are quite a few people who have dabbled in the spoken language without having to grapple with its intractable writing system but consider themselves experts regardless. Anyone who looks at English and Japanese and finds them to be of equivalent complexity probably isn’t qualified to comment on either.
Laaas 4y ago
For such cases I find that the pronunciation _doesn't matter_. The meaning still comes across.
- camdez 4y ago
  I struggle to see how this "doesn't matter" while also agreeing with you that it's a super cool property. Especially for someone coming from an alphabetic language background. Logograms allow you to understand (some) meaning without understanding pronunciation. Syllabaries and alphabets allow you to understand pronunciation (to varying degrees of success depending on spelling consistency) without necessarily understanding meaning. It's all tradeoffs. These days I read Chinese much better than Japanese, and it's definitely fun that I can look at a page full of Japanese and understand the meaning of many words just from knowing the (largely parallel) meaning of the kanji / Hanzi from Chinese. Conversely, I can read (the sounds of) Hangul, but I rightly know about 20 Korean words, so it's all just sounds to me. But I can read the name off of a Korean hotel sign and communicate it to a Korean taxi driver. I can't do the same in Japan if I don't know the pronunciation, even if I know exactly what the sign means. If it affects your ability to use the language effectively to achieve what you want then I think it matters.

tshaddox 4y ago

Aren't you just pointing out that fluent speakers don't often have a problem communicating? Surely that's true for any language, almost tautologically (they would have changed the language, even unintentionally, if there were major problems).

pezezin 4y ago

> I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible. They don't transpose the strokes, they just forget how to write the character entirely, even if they can read it perfectly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia I live in Japan and I have seen it happen many times, suddenly the person needs to stop and check the character in their phone or a dictionary. I have never seen it happens with an alphabet-based language. Sure, you might not be 100% sure about the spelling, but you can always approximate it and write something. Every single Japanese person who I know has told me how much a pain in the ass their language is to read and write, and how they wish it was simpler, but shoganai.

IIAOPSW 4y ago
Mao tried to simplify Chinese and frankly Mao didn't go far enough.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  They actually tried to do a second round in the 1970s. It was felt that they had gone too far so it was abandoned, but not before some people had changed their surnames to use the new simplifications (e.g. 傅 became 付). Some never changed back.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    I love how ` basically becomes 'yadda yadda yadda' for the entire middle of 傅
    - ickoonite 4y ago
      In the first round of simplifications, 義 became 义, which is perhaps one of the most egregious ones that has stuck.

justusw 4y ago

I was working on an import/data conversion task for a Japanese accounting software. I always assumed importing was じゅにゅう, but it is actually うけいれ (受入). Much to my amusement I found out I have been saying breastfeeding (授乳) instead of importing. Theoretically both are readings for the same Kanji, but by convention, a lot of compound verbs are read using kun-yomi instead. Anyway, I hope my tax lawyer still was able to understand what I was trying to communicate? Prepare for people being too polite to point out mistakes. Also sometimes 受入 is written 受け入れ instead! And 支払い can be 支払. It is really confusing. Knowing all these nuances is difficult if you are looking to just use simple rules here and there.

ickoonite 4y ago
読み込む is probably more common for “import” (and 書き出す for “export”). But differences abound. Windows uses 印刷 for print (or did last time I checked); the Mac has long used プリント。And for connoisseurs of truly subtle differences, ウィンドウ on Windows contrasts with ウインドウ on the Mac.
- justusw 4y ago
  Yeah, 読込 is a common way of saying importing too. The particular offender I am using here is called 会計王22 ;) Although using an app released in 2022 in Windows Shift_JIS compatibility mode is giving me less than regal feelings. /s Accounting Japanese is another whole weird world of unusual Japanese, such as 支払手数料 (payment fees) suddenly applying to all kinds of non-fee things as well such as professional services. One should keep in mind here that IT Japanese uses Japanese in places you won’t expect, and when you expect it even less, it will switch back to English.
  - getoj 4y ago
    支払手数料 is “fees paid” rather than “payment fees” - compare 支払利息 and 支払報酬. I’ve never noticed the ambiguity but your confusion is natural. I agree that it’s very strange that professional services fall under 手数料 instead of 報酬, but taxes are weird in every language.

Zababa 4y ago

> It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English Anecdotal, but considering how often I see Japanese people have small struggles with their own language compared to British or American people, I think it is more complex than English.

porknubbins 4y ago
I’m not sure how to measure complexity but after a long time with both languages I have found Japanese has a lot of gaps where there is no word matching an English word and fewer in the other direction. I thought I was bad at Japanese but then I heard things like “get suru” or “stay shita”.
rjh29 4y ago
English people very much have trouble with spelling, pronunciation and grammar as well. The spelling and pronunciation rules are at least as complex as kanji. (At least we don't have to write kanji, though...)

iopq 4y ago

This is just not true let's take something very basic, the kanji 人 has two on'yomi pronunciations, jin and nin and there's no way to tell which one to use without knowing ALL of the words it will be used in 日本人 - nihonjin, so far so good 三人 - sannin, okay, I guess there's two pronunciations 二人 - futari, huh? 一人 - hitori, wat so please tell me how I am supposed to know 人生 (jinsei) from 人気 (ninki) from 恋人 (koibito) from 大人 (otona) even ignoring the irregular reading for "adult" there's still no way to tell those three readings apart in a kanji as basic as person

ickoonite 4y ago
Precisely. A couple more: 隼人 (hayato), 盗人 (nusutto). Or we could enumerate the pronunciations of 日: 日々、日曜日 (which is top-tier insane), 日本、春日、本日、明日、明後日、今日 (take your pick which one I mean), 昨日 (ditto), 一日 (ditto), 二日、十四日〜十五日、二十日〜二十一日｡｡｡ One can marvel at its complexity - relish it even - but one cannot deny it.
wst_ 4y ago
I think taking sides in this debate is pointless. Languages are always as difficult as far they are from your mother tongue or other languages you know. Your question about the reading, though, has quite a simple answer. It's pretty obvious how to read all the examples given when you look at them as words, not a single character. Kanji does not exist in a vacuum. 人気 is "ninki" and 大人 is "otona" - no other way around it. Combination of those characters, usually, have one and only reading. To tell the truth, in English, people are unconsciously reading words as a whole, too.
- iopq 4y ago
  Great, so what is 大人気? if it's 大人気ない it's probably childish, but if it's not in that context, it's probably very popular You need to finish reading the whole SENTENCE to be able to pronounce it
  - wst_ 4y ago
    Not sure I agree with that. It's not difficult to notice one has "nai", other don't. Also when you read it in actual sentence you can immediately notice that something is wrong when you choose the wrong reading. Subsequent words don't add up. I am not saying confusion doesn't occur. I'm just saying it's not as big as people are painting it.

flippinburgers 4y ago

Japanese is vastly more difficult than English.