How Japanese speakers deal with Kanji reading/understanding


I am quite new to learning Japanese. Ideas are welcome.

  1. How do Japanese speakers pronounce Chinese characters? Do they need to remember all the pronunciations of a single Chinese character? And then what? Try to match to figure out the actual meaning?

  2. In a Japanese verb/adj, what do Chinese characters mean in a Japanese speaker's eyes? For a Chinese speaker it means and relates to something.

  3. 慌ただしい and 慌しい are the same, but with different appearances. And the 慌 is pronounced differently. Why not 慌い , which could save some writing?

* * *

I do not want to just remember all the combinations of kanji and their
corresponding pronunciation and meaning, but I would like to be able to
understand which combinations go together, and which do not, as well as how to
derive the meaning from a combination of kanji depending on their
constituents.




  1. No, they understand them as words in their own language, because they are.
  2. It still has some meaning, but again, it's just a word.
  3. I believe this is called okurigana, and it changes what characters are part of the kanji. Some okurigana usages are more common than others. It's not a language all about practicality.

For this specific example, しい tends to form a class of i-adjectives that
indicate a human emotion.

