Question about 後 and 一週間後

Japanese
#1

Hi,
I was watching an anime and was happy to see some kanji I know :smiley:
But that raised some questions.

If you have vocab that consists of several kanji like this. How do you research the reading? I understand the meaning and know most of the readings, but the 後 seems a bit weird.

image

There is no で so it won’t be あとで or あと and it probably is ご But that would mean it is an On’yomi reading. Does that mean that 週間後 is a fixed phrase or compound vocab? I could not find it in jisho or tanoshii. Or is this some kind of casual way of using it?

Google translate says it is indeed “Isshūkan-go” Why is that so and what websites or apps do you usually use to research compound vocab from which you don’t know the compound reading? I don’t really trust google translate and deepl.

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#2

Search for [phrase] 読み方 on google, ask a friend, use a dictionary, etc.

In general 後 is read ご after a phrase that indicates a period of time.

Be careful as some words/phrases have multiple possible readings depending on context or the person. E.g., 昨夜、その他、その後、三階、故郷、etc. The reasons for different possible readings are quite varied (formality, dialect, personal preference, etc) so overall there isn’t one rule although just through experience you should pick them up.

(Sometimes I have gone quite a long time not realising there are multiple ways to read the same word or I have accidentally learnt a less frequent reading so didn’t recognise a word I “knew” when spoken…It happens lol)

7 Likes
#3

Also in this case every kanji is using an Onyomi. In that context it seems obvious the final kanji will also use an Omyomi.

cries in 他

2 Likes
#4

If you want to mine words from anime I highly reccomend you use yomichan + anki.
with yomichan, you hover over the word and it gives you the reading + meaning and then with a click of a button, makes an anki card to remember it with. Also, I would reccomend not trying to guess at kanji readings at all-just learn the word readings with the meanings as they come. Animecards Site
Here is a good site for what I talked about

2 Likes
#5

Even with yomichan some things won’t be parsed unless they are in one of your installed dictionaries. I have like 10 dictionaries installed (9 of which are monolingual) and 一週間後 doesn’t parse. Maybe I am unlucky with my dictionary choices but they are mostly the most common and popular ones, including two pretty massive ones just to get better parsing. You need quite few dictonaries to get good parsng and even then plenty of stuff that might confuse learners isn’t in any dictionary. This is probably the problem OP hit. There is also the issue of words having multiple acceptable readngs, as mentioned.

But +1 for mining vocab though - pretty much essential for moving quickly I think

1 Like
#6

This :point_up:.

The general rule of thumb is that compound Kanji (as in two or more Kanji stuck together) most times are read using Onyomi, while Kanji surrounded by hiragana, or a single Kanji by itself, will use the Kunyomi reading.

Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, but that’s a rule of thumb that I’ve found very useful, especially when reading new words.

This kind of compound is very common in manga and anime. You’ll see it often, so it’ll be easy for you to remember its reading. You probably won’t need to do flashcards to learn it. It’s that common.

And BTW, I know people like to bash on Google translate, but I find that it works really well most times. When it doesn’t, I find it to be mostly do to grammatical or orthographic mistakes from the user, or sentences without context (that would be impossible for Google to know). Other times it gives you a stiff answer, and I suspect it’s due to Google giving you safe responses in case you’re speaking with a stranger (that’s my assumption at least). As you can see, Google was correct when you input your search. It gave you the correct reading :wink:.

2 Likes
#7

I have this happen a lot with compound words and suffixes. Does anyone have any good resources to help with that?