Bunpro/japanese noob question

Bunpro
#1

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Sorry if this is dumb or has been asked before, but why is house in this written as うち instead of いえ?

this is in the reviews of the lesson I just did before they go into your “review stack”

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I know it says うち in the pitch accent part but I thought pitch accent was just the pitch you say the reading, not a completely different reading? All the sample sentences pronounce it as いえ so its very confusing to me.

Is it an alternate pronunciation? I can see from typing it that its a valid way to “type” the kanji with my IME.

thanks in advance!

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#2

This is another reading for the 家 Kanji. It should be its own entry in the vocabulary deck. I’m sure they also have いえ as a separate card, at least that’s the case for some of the one Kanji words I’ve studied.

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#3

Hi!

Just to add up to José’s response, here you can find Jisho’s entry on 家 and the separate card José mentions. As you can see, there is even another kun reading available, や. :sweat_smile:

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About this, the team is using TTS software and is still fine-tuning it so, until this gets sorted out, 家 is always read as いえ even if it should be read うち. The same happens with 様, for example.

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#4

Hi. I’m not 100% sure but I think the word 家 is pronounced いえwhen it means ‘house’ (the building) but うち when it refers to the group of people who are a family (うち, written in kana or as 内, is also used to mean ‘people from inside the group’ as opposed to そと ‘people from outside the group’). At least this interpretation seems to work, based on my experience.

See, for instance 【日本の言葉】「いえ」と「うち」の違い｜日本の言葉と文化 or The difference between ie (いえ) and uchi (うち)

Edit : and this does not concern only people, for instance one can say 家の犬 (うちのいぬ）when refering to the family dog.

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#5

Both 家「うち」 and 家「 いえ」mean house. There’s two vocab entries for them, one each. What’s tripping you up is probably the audio. It’s generated so sometimes doesn’t match the intended vocab

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#6

Both readings うち and いえ are correct!

As mentioned above, いえ is used to refer to the physical building you live in, while うち is used to refer to the physical building and/or the speakers family!

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#7

It is similar to the difference between home and house, but both can refer to the building but each has a different nuance.

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#8

So in the cases where audio doesn’t match text, we should assume that the text is the correct one, right?

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#9

They just do that man. All words have at least two different pronunciations. And it’s really annoying and hard to figure out when to use which. Luckily though it just kind of happens a bit.

I believe the reason goes back to when they added Kanji into the language from the chinese. They also tried to take the chinese pronunciations. But they didn’t want to get rid of their old ones either, so they have the chinese and the japanese in japanese. Although of course the chinese part isn’t chinese, it’s what the japanese thought was chinese a thousand or so years ago.
But that’s kunyomi and uhhh onyomi or something like that.

But basically, almost all kanji have at least two different ways to pronounce them, the meaning stays the same though and some of them have like 10 different ways

#10

Exactly :sparkles:

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