Kanji question in relationship to Haiku

[ElizLestrad]

I was just starting to get a killer headache in my arduous search for an answer when I came across your forum, so hopefully someone will be able to help.


I'm struggling to get a solid answer on the rules for 5/7/5 in relation to kanji and I've seen two different explanations to what the 5-7-5/17 actually eludes to:


1) Syllable count. In the sense that Osaka is counted as 3 syllables.
2) On or 'units of sound'. In the sense that Osaka (o-o-sa-ka) = 4 on (at least, according to the site I was reading about this on)


Where I get confused is I have been unable to find a site that can take kanji and count the number of on for you like there are websites that can count the syllables in English words. While there is a service that will translate English Haiku into kanji, they state flat out they wont guarantee that it will be 5-7-5. Meanwhile other translations services wont do poetry either.


So is there a dictionary or something that I can get that tells you the number of on for each word so that I know where I need to tweak the translation to keep it 5-7-5?

 

[eeky]

As I understand it, you are meant to count so-called "morae" (or "beats"). Basically, one mora corresponds to one kana character (or one digraph like きゃ or しゃ), so long vowels count as two. For example, Osaka in kana is おおさか (O-o-sa-ka, as you say), which would count as four.

I think any decent dictionary will give you the kana representation of kanji words. I use "WWWJDIC" a lot, at WWWJDIC: Word Search . Of course, the same kanji can be read in different ways in different contexts, so you can't just blindly add individual kanji mora counts together.