Most egregious examples of the reading of a kanji changing due to (textually) distant characters


I've been thinking about how Japanese people can read a text (out loud, say)
when the readings of the kanji can be so variable depending on okurigana,
suffixes, or prefixes that change the meaning and/or expected part of speech,
all of which can impact the reading of a kanji. This implies that you have to
"read ahead" before you can be expected to pronounce the phrase correctly. In
English, you are mostly guaranteed to have all the information you need to
pronounce a word correctly after seeing all the letters of the word, with a
few exceptions like "read" [red/ri:d] depending on part of speech, but in
Japanese this distinction is muddier because word boundaries depend on correct
word recognition in the first place. What are the worst examples you can see
of this phenomenon in Japanese?

Although this view is in part informed by many examples which I cannot fully
recall, the ones I can think of at the moment are:

  * 一昨日【おととい】 / 昨日【きのう】 / 日【ひ】
  * 一本気【いっぽんぎ】 / 本気【ほんき】
  * 今日【こんにち】は、先生！ / 今日【きょう】は、先生が来てくれます。

There are of course also many words in Japanese whose readings are not
distinguishable despite any amount of context, because the readings are
interchangeable (family names often fall in this category), but I am
interested in readings which are distinguishable but require a lot of context
before they can be placed correctly.

By the way, what do you usually do when a kanji has multiple readings with
different meanings but context can't distinguish them (because they are the
same part of speech or grammatical role)? I had this issue recently with
開く【ひらく】 / 開く【あく】, and when I asked about it I was told that あく is more
commonly transitive than ひらく. It still seems like a mess, though, even for a
native.




My favorite example is
[この先生きのこるには](http://dic.nicovideo.jp/a/%E3%81%93%E3%81%AE%E5%85%88%E7%94%9F%E3%81%8D%E3%81%AE%E3%81%93%E3%82%8B%E3%81%AB%E3%81%AF).

It was originally posted in a net forum, and was intended to be read as
このさき、いきのこるには (how to survive longer). But many native speakers have misread
this as このせんせい、きのこるには (how does this _sensei_ mushroom(?)), even though there
is no such verb as きのこる.

This sounded so funny that it soon became a piece of net slang, and finally a
character [きのこる先生【せんせい】](http://netyougo.com/aa/4716.html) was created.

From my personal experience, I still make mistakes, for example between
人気【にんき】のない映画 and 人気【ひとけ】のない場所. When such things happen, I just read again
carefully. But such things do not happen that frequently; words like 今日【こんにち】は
and 好【よ】く are usually written in hiragana these days, and pairs like 一本気 and
本気 cause no problem once you've got used to these words.

