CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

How do I know which reading (On or Kun) to use when I see it? I'm still not clear on exactly how it's supposed to work.

I'm not very good at this either. My general rule of thumb, which works a majority of the time (but unfortunately not on a large minority, and I've had to just memorize some exceptions) is that a kanji standing alone, or with okurigana only, should be read as "kun" (native Japanese reading), and that compounds are generally "on".

That being said, keep this in mind (from the NTC New Japanese-English Character Dictionary, page 54a):

"Unfortunately, there is no reliable rule for determining if a character is to be read in the on or kun, or for deciding which of several possible readings to select in a particular instance. A rough guideline is that on-on or kun-kun readings are used in compounds, and kun readings in independent words, but there are many exceptions. For example, 毎朝 maiasa 'every morning' is an on-kun compound, though 毎 has the kun reading goto and 朝 the on reading choo."

So, while my little rule will work a lot of the time, get prepared to memorize a lot of exceptions. It's unfortunately unavoidable.

Ugh... Why couldn't they have just stuck to hiragana and katakana?!!!!
This is very complicated...

The reason "they say" for kanji's existence is to allow the written disambiguation of Japanese's many homonyms. Of course, this reason seems really stupid since it does no good for *oral* homonyms.

As in everything else, though, tradition dies hard (tradition is why English spelling is so ratty too -- don't forget how much trouble this language causes foreign speakers who have to memorize all those bizarre spellings ).

At least our spelling is not as bad as French.