Need Some Help With The Years On These Coins.

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By the way, there is a good reason why I wouldn't encourage people to learn kanji - there are just too many ways to read it. For instance the letter "kuni", when you add words to it, it can become either kuni or koku or "ko" in various other forms. When you have two "kuni" put together, it becomes kuniguni. At least, the only similar term between dai nihon and nihon koku is the word nihon, which just means "Japan". If that was complicated, there are other words that can have more than 5 ways to read it. It is a big mistake to read it as it is. The word "dai" can be read as oo, tai, dai or in rare cases "ya". For instance, if you know the character for Taisho, why isn't it called Daisho or Oosho. Figures. I gave up learning years ago

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Wow, I thought English was the only language that was that difficult. Sounds like it would just be easier to use your site and post here for you to answer gx.....

gxseries, it's true that kanji has many readings but each reading is distinguishable according to the context. As a general rule, single character and words incorporating the okurigana are read with the "kun" reading, while a compound kanjis without okurigana are read with "on" reading except for cases like people's names or ateji words. The word Taishou uses the "on" reading "tai" because that was the given name for the era. Another example is the word "daimyo" that uses "dai" instead of "tai" in order to convey the meaning of the word. "Oo/Ou" is not used for Taishou because that is "kun" reading and "shou" is "on". It's either all "on" or all "kun". Memorizing the readings is difficult but if we understand how to use the characters then it'll be easier. There're other points to discuss but I save those for another times as I'm getting off topic here.

echizento, actually there are about 20,000 kanji recorded in Japanese but only about a quarter of that are in use today including characters for literature, science and tech. 1,850 are the number of characters permitted for official publication after WW2, and that amount was later increased to 1,945.