And thus kanji remains a mystery to me.
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After a bit of confusion i'm confused as to why the kanji 一 turns into tsuitachi for 1st of the month
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It may be helpful to have some background as to the development of kanji in Japanese from Chinese characters. When the Japanese were first starting to write, they did so originally in Chinese and so they used Chinese characters. Eventually, since they still had no writing system of their own, they decided to write the sounds of the Japanese language out with phonetically similar Chinese characters. Later, they developed their own characters (hiragana and katakana) and started using Chinese characters in a similar way as to how they are used today.
So we get a few things happening:
Multiple readings based on the original Chinese pronunciation (and multiple of these pronunciations as some kanji were "borrowed" more than once through history).
Multiple readings based on the Japanese words these characters came to represent ideographically.
That's why Japanese has so many readings for each character (Chinese has like one reading for each of its characters).
Sometimes the reading is the kun-yomi or the Japanese reading. This often appears in words where only one kanji is used.
Sometimes the reading is the on-yomi or the Chinese reading. This often appears in words that are compounds of multiple kanji.
Sometimes the reading is based upon that really old system where the Chinese characters were used simply for their sounds. In this case neither the meaning of the character or its modern reading(s) may be reflected in the word.
As I said originally, it's best to just learn new words and how they are pronounced. Sometimes you'll pick up a pattern that you can use to guess the pronunciation of new words. Just don't worry about straight up memorizing the readings; that is an exercise in futility.
