Onyomi and Kunyomi do I have these readings right way round...

Soooo decided to get back into Kanji as I've been sulking and ignoring them for quite a while...

私たち
彼ら
食べる

These example Kanji can be used as compounds to words so they use the Onyomi right?


分
僕
猫
犬

And these example Kanji are ''stand-alone" so use Kunyomi right...?

Or have I got the wrong end of the proverbial stick here?

The former examples are not "compound words". Those are all kun'yomi. Especially, okurigana can be an indicator of kun'yomi in the last example 食べる.

わたしたち
かれら
たべる

on'yomi compound words examples
私邸[してい]
彼岸[ひがん]
食料[しょくりょう]

Incidentally, there also are kun'yomi compound words or even on-kun, kun-on ones.
kun-kun
私事[わたくしごと]
on-kun
重箱[じゅうばこ]
kun-on
相性[あいしょう]


In the latter examples, 分[ふん] is on'yomi. There are on'yomi words that are used solely, too.


FYI, Kunyomi could be misunderstood as くにょみ, just like once you did. You'd better use kun'yomi.

...an apostrophe to note the separation of easily confused phonemes (usually, syllabic n ん from a following naked vowel or semivowel). For example, the name じゅんいちろう, is written with the kana characters ju-n-i-chi-ro-u, and romanized as Jun'ichirō in Revised Hepburn. Without the apostrophe, it would not be possible to distinguish this correct reading from the incorrect ju-ni-chi-ro-u.

Click to expand...

Romanization of Japanese - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cheers Toritoribe, with regard to Okurigana I thought that refered to the full hiragana word that appears above a kanji in the corner. Confused it with something else I think. I dont see the way of identifying which reading to use its hard getting my head around this which is why I previously gave up briefly.

Also ''ku-n-yo'' I never thought ''ku-nyo'' newbie mistake gah lol.

There is no 100% rule for which reading to use. Even if you establish some cases where you can say it's probably kun'yomi or probably on'yomi you'll still run into exceptions and cases where there are multiples of those, like:
食べる and 食う
着る and 着く

I think you get better at making guesses about the readings of unfamiliar words as your vocabulary increases. It's not necessary to study the kanji readings out of context.