Furigana characters are printed on top of kanji characters, read more about them here. They are a common tool for making Japanese easier to read, because kanji can be read differently, depending on the context. A common question beginners often ask is: How should I learn all these the kanji readings? In short, it’s not recommended to learn these readings individually. A long answer to this is written down in Tae Kim’s blog.
For those of you who are not yet familiar with how the Japanese writing systems work, have a look at this video .
Hey There,
I was wondering how to view the furigana for the kanji on mobile app? When I go to tap it just shows the other side of the card. Cheers.
I felt it intuitively, it’s good that such authority as Tae Kim confirms it. It’s stupid enough to learn words without phrases, but learning kanjis, where many of them have the same pronunciation? It’s worse, I heard that people are trying to learn also a couple of meanings and all possible pronunciations at the same time.
I’m not that smart, sorry. My way is RTK for one of the meanings, and then learning words in real phrases to add more meanings and readings.