漢字音読み一覧表

Why there are so many kanji share the same onyomi?

Onyomi is derived from the Chinese pronunciation for kanji (called Hanzi in Chinese). Unlike other language, each hanzi is actually a word. It has its own meaning and a single-syllable pronunciation. There are limited different single-syllable sounds (about several hundreds) a human can emit. There are many hanzi, therefore there must be repeated pronunciations.

How to memorize kanji's onyomi?

An idea is to classify kanji by onyomi so it is easy to get to know all the kanji of some onyomi. A good news is we can do better than that. The answer is phonetic component.

Most kanji can be decomposed into a semantic component (known as radical, 部首) and a phonetic component (音符). Although kanji's pronunciations change over time, the phonetic component do produce a clue towards the same or similar onyomi. Like kanji with the same phonetic component: 果 and 菓 share the same phonetic component — 果 and the same onyomi — か.

Here we provide a list of kanji classified by onyomi (kanji onyomi in JLPT words). And the kanji with the same onyomi are further grouped by phonetic component. Below is a piece of sample:

Specification:

• 火 A kanji with blue background has only 1 (or 0) onyomi (in JLPT words not all words).
• 河 A kanji with black background has 2 or more onyomi.
• 可:可河 A yellow symbol followed by a list kanji is a phontic component. 1 indicates all the kanji with the phonetic component share one onyomi (or have not onyomi).

• あ
• か
• さ
• た
• な
• は
• ま
• や
• ら
• わ