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Enough of the interesting posts. I think I'll talk about Japanese linguistic crap that nobody cares about but me.

So, if I haven't already mentioned this about a million times, Japanese is written using three separate character sets, hiragana, 平仮名; katakana, 片仮名, and kanji, 漢字. Hiragana and katakana were both developed specifically for Japanese, and thus enjoy a wonderful one-to-one correspondence with the sounds that exist in the language (or close to it, I'll get to some flaws later). Kanji literally means Chinese (Han) characters, and are, unsurprisingly borrowed from Chinese.

What happened was a long time ago, actually a few times during the past, specifically during the times of the Southern and Northern (Baekje) dynasties, the Tang Dynasty, the Song Dynasty, and the Ming Dynasty, the Japanese sent people over to China to learn Chinese. You see, for a very long time, Japan was basically just a couple of backwater islands of rice farmers without even a properly organized feudal system, while China was sort of the end-all-be-all of huge empires, at least as far as the far east goes. So, some of the high class Japanese learned how to read, write, and speak classical (actually properly Middle) Chinese. They brought this back to Japan, where it remained the language of the literate and scholarly. Eventually, people started writing Japanese using Chinese characters, because, hey, it's not like they had their own script or anything.

Now, the problem with doing that was that Chinese basically sounds nothing like Japanese because they are from different language families, and indeed, Japanese is a very weird language in the scheme of things. So, basically, the system didn't work very well. What then happened was that people started simplifying Chinese characters by writing them cursively and leaving out strokes to create the system called hiragana. Here are a couple examples:

由, which is read something like "yu" in Middle Chinese, got shortend to ゆ, the Japanese character "yu." The Chinese character carries a meaning, specifically, reason or cause, while the Japanese character is purely phonetic. Another example:

以 similarly became い, both of which are read "i." Again, the Japanese character carries no inherent meaning, while the Chinese one means roughly "or" as in 以上, ijou = or more, or 以下, ika = or less.

So, how does this all work out in modern Japanese? Kanji are used for their meanings, and carry multiple readings. A reading is just a way of reading something, unsurprisingly. When the Japanese borrowed all these characters, they also borrowed a lot of Chinese words along with them. Chinese was a much more highly developed language, as China was way more advanced than Japan, so using these words allowed for more technical language, and also carried some social value, much as using words from Latin does in English. So, when in a Chinese loanword, the characters have their "Chinese" reading, or on-yomi, 音読み, literally, sound-reading. The thing is because Japanese and Chinese are wildly different, Japanese people couldn't generally pronounce the Chinese words "properly," so the sounds changed quite a bit in translation. Think Americans trying to say "croissant," "beaucoup," or "laissez faire," for comparison.

But, Japanese didn't just forget their own language. They still mostly used Japanese words, even though many concepts could only be expressed using Chinese ones. So, when there was a Japanese word with an equivalent or similar meaning to a character that was borrowed, that character would be assigned that reading, which is called a kunyomi, 訓読み, literally instruct-reading. I'm oversimplifying here a bit, as there are actually multiple Chinese readings for a lot of characters, since they were borrowed at multiple points throughout history from different areas of China, but, onward and ever upward.

So, how do you read stuff in Japanese? It's not all guesswork, though sometimes you do actually just have to guess. Generally, since the Chinese characters were designed for Chinese, and Chinese doesn't really inflect the same way that western or Japanese languages do, a character representing a concept, the one character will suffice. For example, in Chinese 昨日我見他了, (which may need to be corrected, I have only learned a bit of Chinese from the internets), would be translated character for character as "last-day-I-see-him/her-completed," or more nicely as "yesterday, I saw him/her." So, each character in Chinese represents a sound and a concept and it all works out nicely because of the lack of inflection.

Putting the same sentence into Japanese, we get 昨日、私が彼を見ました。(kinoo, watashi ga kare wo [pronounced o] mimashita.) You can see some similarities. The first two characters form a compound in both Chinese and Japanese, last-day, meaning yesterday. Actually, that is an interesting compound as it can be read multiple ways in Japanese, but I digress even further. Also, the character for see is present in both sentences. All those really simple characters (が、を、ました) are hiragana, and are added for the purpose of making it a Japanese sentence. Specifically, が, ga, marks the subject of the sentence, を, wo, marks the object, and ました, mashita, conjugates the verb to past-polite form. These things aren't necessary in Chinese because the verb doesn't inflect, and word order controls function in a sentence, not particles, as in Japanese.

One other thing you might have noticed is that there are Chinese characters in both sentences not used in the other one, specifically, 我、私、他、彼、了. These are generally just slight differences in usage. Both 我 and 私 translate to I, and both are used, but the first one is typical in Chinese, while the second one is typical in Japanese. In fact, the first one is very formal in Japanese and would sound ridiculous if used in every day conversation. I'm not sure, but I think the second one is mostly used in compounds in Chinese, for things referring to the self. The characters for him, 彼 and 他, are also both used in both languages, but have slightly different uses. The first one is the typical pronoun for he/him in Japanese, but it isn't used that much because Japanese culture dictates you use someone's name if you know it, and sometimes it carries the connotation of a boyfriend. The second one just means "other" in Japanese, so isn't really used in the same way. I can't really speak to the usage in Chinese other than what I've seen in subtitles and from talking to one Taiwanese guy, who said they almost always use this gender non-specific pronoun, so that is why Chinese speakers of English often confuse he and she. The last charcter there is used in Chinese to mark completed actions, I have read, as well as to add emphasis. In Japanese, it is used in compounds (this character has no kun-yomi) such as 終了, shuuryou, meaning complete. It doesn't have a special grammatical purpose.

Alright, so on to the actual reading thing. That last compound I listed is a good example of how you figure out how to read a character in Japanese. The first character, 終, has the on-yomi shuu, but also the kun-yomi o(waru)(eru). This should give a hint as to how to read it. If it is followed by another Chinese character, as above, then it is probably using the on-yomi (Chinese, remember?), but if it is followed by hiragana, specifically the hiragana for waru or eru, it is the Japanese reading. That would look like this: 終わる　or this:　終える. Again, the hiragana serve grammatical purpose, and if they are changed, it would be for following Japanese grammatical rules.

There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb, and that is sort of annoying. For example, 出口, deguchi, meaning exit, is made of two Chinese characters read with their kun-yomi. The reason for this is that the first one is de(ru) meaning go out, and the second one is kuchi [in this case guchi], meaning mouth, so there are no extra hiragana to leave in when they are combined. It's frustrating because it looks like it should be shukkou, but is not. More frustrating is the combination of 入る, iru, to enter, and 口. It is usually written as 入口, although 入り口 is also fine. Either way, it is read iriguchi and means entrance. However, the second compound gives you a nice little clue that it is the kun-yomi by leaving in the hiragana for ri. The first one is just easier to write, but makes it look like a Chinese compound word, which it isn't.

Furthermore, there are some relatively rare words that use both readings, such as 唐楓, toukaede, meaning trident maple. The first one, tou, meaning Tang, is the on-yomi, while the second, kaede, is the Japanese reading for maple. That is a relatively obscure exaple, but I couldn't think of any of the more common ones. Regardless, it is frustrating. Congrats on getting through this one.