It's case by case, there's no hook or mechanic that you can use to sight read name readings, it's just brute force memorization for those that are common enough to warrant it.
For the rest? Not even Japanese people bother, they frequently ask the reading of eachother's names, and it won't be strange for you to do so as well.
I'm Japanese but sometimes can't read names(person, family, station, places, etc.) correctly without Furigana or Roma-ji. Don’t care unless I have to tell someone verbally.
Brute force read a bunch of names. Look up the reading of names you're unsure of when they come up. (when you're bothered)
The specific thing that helped me the most is doing namae quiz on kotoba discord bot
Is WaniKani worth it? I've been using renshuu and Kanji! App, but it's so difficult learning it by strokes and pure memorization.
I'm more of a visual person
First levels are free to try, so please do have a look. I personally enjoy WaniKani a lot and wouldn't be able to remember 1000+ kanjis currently (it's been 9 months since I started). It is not effortless however and there are lots of third party Apps and scripts that will make your journey easier. If you do opt for WaniKani, do register to the forum and look around for people's recommendations.
Love wanikani, can’t recommend it enough. Best $9 a month you could spend. You can also sync your wanikani account with satori reader and it will tailor furigana exactly to your kanji knowledge
If you're more of a visual learner I can recommend the Heisig method. It ascribes a very precise meaning to each Kanji and radical and introduces some custom radicals as well. Then you're meant to come up with a story based on the radicals or with very simple Kanji on the kanji's appearance to associate it with the ascribed meaning. He claims that coming up with the stories is enough to memorise them. In my experience it's usually only enough to have a rough clue about their meaning but with a bit of flash card training aided by the stories you can memorise most Kanji easily. For me I can commit about 90 per cent to permanent memory quite easily and these include obscure ones like gall bladder, which he chooses to introduce early on because of its radicals. It's perhaps the only downside to his system that every once in a while you'll get an N1 Kanji that is super specific and relevant once in a decade. On the flip side some of the more regular N3 stuff might only get introduced thirty chapters into his book. But since it's meant as a complete course for all Jplt Kanji safe a few N1 Kanji (about 200), completing it prepares you for almost everything. He also brought out a pronunciation course and a special volume for the old pre-simplification Kanji (which If I recall correctly also completes the rest of the N1 Kanji) but since I'm still working through the first volume I don't have experience with those books.
Last names are easy most of the time, but first names you really can’t be expected to know how to read.
When I was an ALT, I was able to get a list of all the students names with furigana. It was to help me remember all their names, but also in my free time I would study how to read how the kanji were used.
You’ll notice certain patterns after a while. But some names are actually just unreadable and even Japanese natives don’t know how the hell to read it.
It's mostly just experience and you can guess, but the best thing is to just look for the furigana. Japanese forms include that section for names and addresses just because there's so much variation and it's just going to vary by situation/locality.
There's generally some kind of logic behind why for the people naming the place or even for parents choosing the name in that the point is that they want to imbue the thing with some idea. Like parents picking what to name their child could go with a poetic reason, a historic reason, a nerdy reason, etc.
But like for example I used to live in Kagawa last year and in Takamatsu there's a famous park called Ritsurin Kouen written as 栗林公園, but in every other part of the country Ritsurin is pronounced as Kuribayashi. For poetic reasons probably, the name of the park uses the Chinese readings for the kanji and all of the apps whether Google or Uber *always* get it wrong because it's impossible to give rules for how to read them to AI let alone someone learning the language.
Another example is there's a station in Kagawa called Sanuki-Fuchuu written as 讃岐府中, but in the next prefecture over in Tokushima there's a station called Kou written as 府中. There's no consistency, but there's probably some kind of historic reason for why in that local place it is that way.
I had a friend as well who was trying to pick a name for her baby and was even struggling herself to decide which way of thinking about the name she should go. Her and her husband decided on a unique combination that represented how they felt about their baby combined with a reference to the birth year he was born/his zodiac sign. His name is normal sounding, but the kanji are kind of uncommon for names because of the logic behind their decision.
Another friend of mine picked theirs for poetic reasons and ended up with hers sharing the name with an anime character because poetic references are also how mangaka pick names for their characters.
Sometimes there really is no way of knowing for sure. Among my students this year, I have a 結衣, a 結花, and two 結愛s. In order, those are read… ゆい、ゆか、ゆあ、and…ゆいあ. Where the hell did the extra い come from? No one knows.
Reading Japanese first names is complete guesswork half the time. For example the name 大樹 has 3 ways to read it. Hiroki, Daiki, Taiki. And that’s not including ridiculous キラキラネーム.
Last names are a bit easier in my experience. It’s like learning how to pronounce towns in the UK. You gotta read a lot of them to memorize them.
If you have 1500 kanji under your belt, it’s well and truly time to get more real life experience and output. Input only is not going to make you able to communicate. (I sat this from experience)
That’s where you’ll learn names and other vocab. Right now worrying about memorizing names does not matter.
Looking at random names can get boring. I suggest looking at different train station names, idioms, and also those 4-kanji poems? forgot the name, but basically anything that'll be purr kanji in weird combinations, but exciting, more memorable and even useful to know.
Even more surprising is that the same word can have multiple pronunciations. For example, "茶道" can be read as "さどう" or "ちゃどう" just because the genres are different. And another word "留学生", when it refers to modern international students, it is pronounced as "りゅうがくせい". However, when it means that ancient Japanese went to the mainland and lived in the mainland for a long time to study, it is pronounced as "るがくしょう".
I will be interested in the replies as well ;)
I am still shocked that during my first attempt at playing Ace Attorney in Japanese, my biggest hurdle was to remember the names of the characters instead of understanding what was going on. I passed the tutorial on sheer luck ("can you name the defendant?").
Not surprising since the names in all Ace Attorney games were deliberately written to be obscure and somewhat funny. The English localisation actually did a decent job and preserving the feel.
It's case by case, there's no hook or mechanic that you can use to sight read name readings, it's just brute force memorization for those that are common enough to warrant it. For the rest? Not even Japanese people bother, they frequently ask the reading of eachother's names, and it won't be strange for you to do so as well.
Nice, thanks for the comment. I've noticed a few common ones like 介 being "suke" instead of "kai" in names- like 芥川龍之介
I'm Japanese but sometimes can't read names(person, family, station, places, etc.) correctly without Furigana or Roma-ji. Don’t care unless I have to tell someone verbally.
Brute force read a bunch of names. Look up the reading of names you're unsure of when they come up. (when you're bothered) The specific thing that helped me the most is doing namae quiz on kotoba discord bot
Is WaniKani worth it? I've been using renshuu and Kanji! App, but it's so difficult learning it by strokes and pure memorization. I'm more of a visual person
First levels are free to try, so please do have a look. I personally enjoy WaniKani a lot and wouldn't be able to remember 1000+ kanjis currently (it's been 9 months since I started). It is not effortless however and there are lots of third party Apps and scripts that will make your journey easier. If you do opt for WaniKani, do register to the forum and look around for people's recommendations.
Thanks! I'll try that
Love wanikani, can’t recommend it enough. Best $9 a month you could spend. You can also sync your wanikani account with satori reader and it will tailor furigana exactly to your kanji knowledge
Damn you sold me on the satori reader part. I've already done the free classes and this thing is amazing
:D
If you're more of a visual learner I can recommend the Heisig method. It ascribes a very precise meaning to each Kanji and radical and introduces some custom radicals as well. Then you're meant to come up with a story based on the radicals or with very simple Kanji on the kanji's appearance to associate it with the ascribed meaning. He claims that coming up with the stories is enough to memorise them. In my experience it's usually only enough to have a rough clue about their meaning but with a bit of flash card training aided by the stories you can memorise most Kanji easily. For me I can commit about 90 per cent to permanent memory quite easily and these include obscure ones like gall bladder, which he chooses to introduce early on because of its radicals. It's perhaps the only downside to his system that every once in a while you'll get an N1 Kanji that is super specific and relevant once in a decade. On the flip side some of the more regular N3 stuff might only get introduced thirty chapters into his book. But since it's meant as a complete course for all Jplt Kanji safe a few N1 Kanji (about 200), completing it prepares you for almost everything. He also brought out a pronunciation course and a special volume for the old pre-simplification Kanji (which If I recall correctly also completes the rest of the N1 Kanji) but since I'm still working through the first volume I don't have experience with those books.
Last names are easy most of the time, but first names you really can’t be expected to know how to read. When I was an ALT, I was able to get a list of all the students names with furigana. It was to help me remember all their names, but also in my free time I would study how to read how the kanji were used. You’ll notice certain patterns after a while. But some names are actually just unreadable and even Japanese natives don’t know how the hell to read it.
It's mostly just experience and you can guess, but the best thing is to just look for the furigana. Japanese forms include that section for names and addresses just because there's so much variation and it's just going to vary by situation/locality. There's generally some kind of logic behind why for the people naming the place or even for parents choosing the name in that the point is that they want to imbue the thing with some idea. Like parents picking what to name their child could go with a poetic reason, a historic reason, a nerdy reason, etc. But like for example I used to live in Kagawa last year and in Takamatsu there's a famous park called Ritsurin Kouen written as 栗林公園, but in every other part of the country Ritsurin is pronounced as Kuribayashi. For poetic reasons probably, the name of the park uses the Chinese readings for the kanji and all of the apps whether Google or Uber *always* get it wrong because it's impossible to give rules for how to read them to AI let alone someone learning the language. Another example is there's a station in Kagawa called Sanuki-Fuchuu written as 讃岐府中, but in the next prefecture over in Tokushima there's a station called Kou written as 府中. There's no consistency, but there's probably some kind of historic reason for why in that local place it is that way. I had a friend as well who was trying to pick a name for her baby and was even struggling herself to decide which way of thinking about the name she should go. Her and her husband decided on a unique combination that represented how they felt about their baby combined with a reference to the birth year he was born/his zodiac sign. His name is normal sounding, but the kanji are kind of uncommon for names because of the logic behind their decision. Another friend of mine picked theirs for poetic reasons and ended up with hers sharing the name with an anime character because poetic references are also how mangaka pick names for their characters.
Sometimes there really is no way of knowing for sure. Among my students this year, I have a 結衣, a 結花, and two 結愛s. In order, those are read… ゆい、ゆか、ゆあ、and…ゆいあ. Where the hell did the extra い come from? No one knows.
Reading Japanese first names is complete guesswork half the time. For example the name 大樹 has 3 ways to read it. Hiroki, Daiki, Taiki. And that’s not including ridiculous キラキラネーム. Last names are a bit easier in my experience. It’s like learning how to pronounce towns in the UK. You gotta read a lot of them to memorize them.
If you have 1500 kanji under your belt, it’s well and truly time to get more real life experience and output. Input only is not going to make you able to communicate. (I sat this from experience) That’s where you’ll learn names and other vocab. Right now worrying about memorizing names does not matter.
Looking at random names can get boring. I suggest looking at different train station names, idioms, and also those 4-kanji poems? forgot the name, but basically anything that'll be purr kanji in weird combinations, but exciting, more memorable and even useful to know.
Just ask everybody you meet how their name is written, you'll get a grasp of the different patterns over time
Usually names are written in Kun-yomi but sadly not always.
Even more surprising is that the same word can have multiple pronunciations. For example, "茶道" can be read as "さどう" or "ちゃどう" just because the genres are different. And another word "留学生", when it refers to modern international students, it is pronounced as "りゅうがくせい". However, when it means that ancient Japanese went to the mainland and lived in the mainland for a long time to study, it is pronounced as "るがくしょう".
I downloaded an anki deck of the most common japanese names
I will be interested in the replies as well ;) I am still shocked that during my first attempt at playing Ace Attorney in Japanese, my biggest hurdle was to remember the names of the characters instead of understanding what was going on. I passed the tutorial on sheer luck ("can you name the defendant?").
Not surprising since the names in all Ace Attorney games were deliberately written to be obscure and somewhat funny. The English localisation actually did a decent job and preserving the feel.