<p>It's great that you noticed these patterns as a language learner! It's absolutely true that there are systematic correspondences between Japanese onyomi and Mandarin and sino-Korean pronunciations. Unfortunately for you, they are very complicated!</p>
<h3>Middle Chinese - good news and bad</h3>
<p>It's important to keep in mind that all of these pronunciations derive from Chinese pronunciations from ~1500 years ago. If you (somehow) already know how a character was pronounced in Middle Chinese (why would you though?), you can follow rules to derive how it is (or is expected to be) pronounced in Mandarin, Japanese go-on, Japanese kan-on, Korean, Cantonese, etc. However, if you (very reasonably) <em>don't</em> know the Middle Chinese pronunciation, you will be missing some information that you need for predicting all these pronunciations and have to either guess or triangulate based on multiple languages. For example, let's look at 日:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The Middle Chinese pronunciation is something like <code>nyit</code>. The &quot;tone&quot; is 入声, which really just means the word ended in a final stop consonant (in this case <code>t</code>).</p>
</li>
<li><p>In Mandarin, the initial <code>ny</code> sound became pinyin <code>r</code>. Final stops (like <code>t</code>) disappeared with some somewhat unpredictable effects on the preceding vowel and tone. However, when the initial consonant was a sonorant (as was the case here), then the resulting tone for words that used to have final stops is 4th. High front vowels generally stayed as high-front vowels, but when following <code>r</code>, they become so-called &quot;apical&quot; vowels. Put it all together, and you get <code>rì</code>. This is exactly what is predicted by theory, but keep in mind that knowing Pinyin <code>rì</code> does not let you go the opposite direction and perfectly derive Middle Chinese <code>nyit</code>. There are multiple Middle Chinese intials that became Mandarin <code>r</code>, and of course Mandarin has totally eliminated final stops, so it's not obvious that this used to end in a <code>t</code>.</p>
</li>
<li><p>In Cantonese, the initial <code>ny</code> sound became a &quot;y&quot; sound (which is spelled <code>j</code> in the jyutping system). Final stop consonants are retained. Also, for voiced 入声 characters, the Cantonese tone is 6 (which is sometimes written as 9). I could not tell you anything about how Cantonese vowels correspond to Middle Chinese. Anyhow, the final result is <code>jat6</code>, and this is exactly what is predicted from the Middle Chinese, according to Wiktionary. Cantonese is less lossy than Mandarin, but again, there are multiple initials that could have resulted in Cantonese <code>j</code>.</p>
</li>
<li><p>In Japanese, there were borrowings from Chinese at multiple times, and the rules are different. For go-on readings, initial <code>ny</code> becomes initial <code>n</code>. For kan-on readings, initial <code>ny</code> becomes initial <code>z</code>. Final <code>t</code> was borrowed as either <code>ti</code> or <code>tu</code>. For kan-on, it's always the latter, and for go-on, I don't know if there's a rule about which. In any event, later developments in Japanese phonology resulted in palatalization or affrication to <code>chi</code> and <code>tsu</code> respectively (also, <code>si</code> and <code>zi</code> became <code>shi</code> and <code>ji</code>). So, we expect <code>nichi (にち)</code> and <code>jitsu (じつ)</code> as the go-on and kan-on readings, and that's in fact what we find. Note that Japanese usually preserves evidence of final <code>t</code>s and <code>k</code>s, but it's a language with 5 vowels and a pretty limited set of consonants, so usually the Japanese pronunciation is missing a ton of information about the Middle Chinese, although it does pretty well in the case of 日.</p>
</li>
<li><p>Korean, like Japanese and Cantonese, retains final stops. For whatever reason, final <code>t</code> becomes final <code>l</code>. The initial <code>ny</code> <em>started out</em> being borrowed as <code>z</code>. This gives a Middle Korean pronunciation of <code>zil (ᅀᅵᆯ)</code>. As you might have noticed, the initial <code>z</code> doesn't exist in Korean at all anymore. Modern Korean is <code>il (일)</code> (like the &quot;il&quot; in Kim Jong-Il) which makes it rather difficult to figure out the Middle Chinese initial from the modern Korean.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h3>Resources</h3>
<p>There are good books and references on this subject. I recommend <a href="https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0521296536" rel="nofollow noreferrer" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Jerry Norman's <em>Chinese</em></a> for a basic overview of Chinese historical phonology. At least, I liked it when I read it in college. Wikipedia has a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology" rel="nofollow noreferrer">decent article on Chinese historical phonology</a> and an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ok article on Sino-Japanese words</a>. Also, I often refer to <a href="https://www.frathwiki.com/Chinese_sound_correspondences" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this chart of Middle Chinese sound correspondences</a>. You can also just get a sense of how things tend to work by looking up the Middle Chinese, Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese pronunciations of characters when you have a question about a correspondence. After seeing a bunch of them, you'll figure out plenty of rules of thumb even if you never learn anything about historical phonology.</p>
<h3>Stumpy Joe Pete's Rules of Thumb</h3>
<p>Here are some rules of thumb I often use when learning Japanese (and already knowing Mandarin and having some random historical Chinese phonology knowledge):</p>
<ul>
<li><p>For vowels, you just have to guess. Going from Mandarin backwards to Middle Chinese and then forward to Japanese is just too lossy for vowels. At the very least, I have not found it productive to try and memorize information about Middle Chinese vowel correspondences. I basically just guess that it's a front vowel (i, e) or a back vowel (a, o, u) based on the Mandarin.</p>
</li>
<li><p>There are two very important pieces of Middle Chinese information that have been lost in Mandarin. I think it's worth keeping track of this stuff when it comes up, as it's so important for guessing pronunciations in Japanese (or Cantonese or whatever). The first is final stop consonants (入声) <code>p</code>, <code>t</code>, and <code>k</code>. Almost every language you'd care to learn other than Mandarin preserves these to some extent. The second is for pinyin <code>j</code> and <code>q</code> whether they originally came from an affricate or from a velar stop. E.g., 青岛 was once <code>cingdao</code> (or &quot;tsingtao&quot; as they spell it on the beer), but 重庆 was once <code>chongking</code> (or &quot;chungking&quot; as they spelled it in Hong Kong). <code>cing</code> and <code>king</code> merged into <code>qing</code>. In Japanese, the kan-on readings for those characters are <code>sei (せい)</code> and <code>kei (けい)</code>. If you knew whether it was velar, you have a shot, and if not, you're just guessing whether it's an <code>s</code> or a <code>k</code> in Japanese. You don't have to memorize it for every character either--the phonetic components of the characters are consistent about this (青 series always has initial affricate in MC, 合 series always have a final <code>p</code> in MC, etc.).</p>
</li>
<li><p>Middle Chinese had three final nasals (<code>m</code>, <code>n</code>, and <code>ng</code>). Mandarin merged <code>m</code> into <code>n</code>, and so did Japanese when borrowing them. But the final <code>ng</code> in Mandarin corresponds to long vowels in Japanese. 光 is <code>guāng</code> in Mandarin but <code>kou (こう)</code> in Japanese. One thing that's a bit confusing is that final <code>p</code> also ended up becoming a long vowel too, so the 合 in 都合 is pronounced <code>gou (ごう)</code> rather than <code>gopu</code> or <code>gofu</code> or whatever it was historically. When guessing <em>which</em> long vowel, the options in descending order of commonness are: <code>*ou</code>, <code>*you</code>, <code>*ei</code>, <code>*uu</code>.</p>
</li>
<li><p>Middle Chinese had a three-way distinction in voicing for stops. Unvoiced aspirated (like pinyin <code>p</code>), unvoiced unaspirated (like pinyin <code>b</code> or a French <code>p</code>), and voiced (like French <code>b</code>). Mandarin lost the distinction between unvoiced unaspirated and voiced. Japanese had a voicing distinction but not an aspiration one, so when borrowing, the first two categories were merged. This is sort of a pain in the ass when guessing Japanese pronunciations. I default to guessing unvoiced, but if the character is a second tone in Mandarin, then it should be voiced. E.g., 同乗 is <code>どうじょう</code> rather than <code>とうしょう</code> (both the characters are 2nd tone in Mandarin).</p>
</li>
<li><p>You're never going to guess everything perfectly: between missing information in your source language, an inability to memorize all of historical phonology, along with true irregular exceptions, you will be wrong a lot. That's fine. If you're guessing sort of close to the right pronunciation, I find that it makes the memorization of the correct pronunciations a lot easier, since they're already in the ballpark of what I would expect. It's a lot easier for me than memorizing kun-yomi pronunciations anyways!</p>
</li>
</ul>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-06-03T20:09:39.130Z
Thank you for the answer. I know some Japanese but not enough to provide a thorough answer to this question. I learned a lot from you.
PdotWang
CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-06-03T19:48:54.750Z
2024-06-04T20:13:31.273Z
2024-06-04T20:13:31.273Z
Stumpy Joe Pete
<p>I recently started learning Japanese, and noticed that one may find some pronunciation similarities between mandarin, onyomi Japanese, and Korean.
Here are a few examples:</p>
<ul>
<li>教室:きょうしつ:교실</li>
<li>秘密:ひみつ:비밀</li>
</ul>
<p>Is there any sort of set of rules to follow in order to convert the pronunciation in one language to another? That would be pretty useful to easily and quickly expand my Japanese vocabulary as I have several thousand words of vocabulary in Chinese and Korean that could potentially be reused.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-06-03T17:55:32.950Z
If you want the Chinese to be based on Pinyin, it maybe possible. But for HanZi, it would be impossible.
PdotWang
CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-06-03T18:06:36.703Z
I think 准备 and 开始 are another two that should be quite similar. Not sure that there's any pattern but on'yomi should be generally close to Chinese as it is basically the approximation of the Chinese reading from the time it was created.
Mou某
CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-06-03T19:23:33.917Z
This isn’t really a question suitable for Chinese StackExchange. See https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/82511 for a similar question.
dROOOze
CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-06-03T19:51:34.707Z
@dROOOze I think it's fine. The phonological correspondences between Chinese and sino-xenic languages is a huge chunk of Chinese historical phonology, and questions about it seems equally at home in any of the related stack exchanges.
Stumpy Joe Pete
CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-06-03T20:04:54.580Z
@StumpyJoePete it's about how the question is asked. If the question asked was, "I noticed that there are regular sound shifts from Chinese and Japanese for *on'yomi*; how did these shift from Chinese?", then it belongs on this site. "How do I convert Chinese words into Japanese" (which is pretty much what this question asks) does not belong on this site - there are very likely some nuances which Japanese SE will have people covering much better.
dROOOze
<pronunciation>
Conversion to Japanese pronunciation
# Conversion to Japanese pronunciation

(Asked by: username_0 on 2024-06-03)

I recently started learning Japanese, and noticed that one may find some pronunciation similarities between mandarin, onyomi Japanese, and Korean.
Here are a few examples:

* 教室:きょうしつ:교실
* 秘密:ひみつ:비밀

Is there any sort of set of rules to follow in order to convert the pronunciation in one language to another? That would be pretty useful to easily and quickly expand my Japanese vocabulary as I have several thousand words of vocabulary in Chinese and Korean that could potentially be reused.

**Tags:** pronunciation

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: If you want the Chinese to be based on Pinyin, it maybe possible. But for HanZi, it would be impossible.  
> **username_2**: I think 准备 and 开始 are another two that should be quite similar. Not sure that there's any pattern but on'yomi should be generally close to Chinese as it is basically the approximation of the Chinese reading from the time it was created.  
> **username_3**: This isn’t really a question suitable for Chinese StackExchange. See https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/82511 for a similar question.  
> **username_4**: @username_3 I think it's fine. The phonological correspondences between Chinese and sino-xenic languages is a huge chunk of Chinese historical phonology, and questions about it seems equally at home in any of the related stack exchanges.  
> **username_3**: @StumpyJoePete it's about how the question is asked. If the question asked was, "I noticed that there are regular sound shifts from Chinese and Japanese for *on'yomi*; how did these shift from Chinese?", then it belongs on this site. "How do I convert Chinese words into Japanese" (which is pretty much what this question asks) does not belong on this site - there are very likely some nuances which Japanese SE will have people covering much better.  

---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_4 on 2024-06-03. Score: 6 | Accepted answer

It's great that you noticed these patterns as a language learner! It's absolutely true that there are systematic correspondences between Japanese onyomi and Mandarin and sino-Korean pronunciations. Unfortunately for you, they are very complicated!

### Middle Chinese - good news and bad

It's important to keep in mind that all of these pronunciations derive from Chinese pronunciations from ~1500 years ago. If you (somehow) already know how a character was pronounced in Middle Chinese (why would you though?), you can follow rules to derive how it is (or is expected to be) pronounced in Mandarin, Japanese go-on, Japanese kan-on, Korean, Cantonese, etc. However, if you (very reasonably) *don't* know the Middle Chinese pronunciation, you will be missing some information that you need for predicting all these pronunciations and have to either guess or triangulate based on multiple languages. For example, let's look at 日:

* The Middle Chinese pronunciation is something like `nyit`. The "tone" is 入声, which really just means the word ended in a final stop consonant (in this case `t`).
* In Mandarin, the initial `ny` sound became pinyin `r`. Final stops (like `t`) disappeared with some somewhat unpredictable effects on the preceding vowel and tone. However, when the initial consonant was a sonorant (as was the case here), then the resulting tone for words that used to have final stops is 4th. High front vowels generally stayed as high-front vowels, but when following `r`, they become so-called "apical" vowels. Put it all together, and you get `rì`. This is exactly what is predicted by theory, but keep in mind that knowing Pinyin `rì` does not let you go the opposite direction and perfectly derive Middle Chinese `nyit`. There are multiple Middle Chinese intials that became Mandarin `r`, and of course Mandarin has totally eliminated final stops, so it's not obvious that this used to end in a `t`.
* In Cantonese, the initial `ny` sound became a "y" sound (which is spelled `j` in the jyutping system). Final stop consonants are retained. Also, for voiced 入声 characters, the Cantonese tone is 6 (which is sometimes written as 9). I could not tell you anything about how Cantonese vowels correspond to Middle Chinese. Anyhow, the final result is `jat6`, and this is exactly what is predicted from the Middle Chinese, according to Wiktionary. Cantonese is less lossy than Mandarin, but again, there are multiple initials that could have resulted in Cantonese `j`.
* In Japanese, there were borrowings from Chinese at multiple times, and the rules are different. For go-on readings, initial `ny` becomes initial `n`. For kan-on readings, initial `ny` becomes initial `z`. Final `t` was borrowed as either `ti` or `tu`. For kan-on, it's always the latter, and for go-on, I don't know if there's a rule about which. In any event, later developments in Japanese phonology resulted in palatalization or affrication to `chi` and `tsu` respectively (also, `si` and `zi` became `shi` and `ji`). So, we expect `nichi (にち)` and `jitsu (じつ)` as the go-on and kan-on readings, and that's in fact what we find. Note that Japanese usually preserves evidence of final `t`s and `k`s, but it's a language with 5 vowels and a pretty limited set of consonants, so usually the Japanese pronunciation is missing a ton of information about the Middle Chinese, although it does pretty well in the case of 日.
* Korean, like Japanese and Cantonese, retains final stops. For whatever reason, final `t` becomes final `l`. The initial `ny` *started out* being borrowed as `z`. This gives a Middle Korean pronunciation of `zil (ᅀᅵᆯ)`. As you might have noticed, the initial `z` doesn't exist in Korean at all anymore. Modern Korean is `il (일)` (like the "il" in Kim Jong-Il) which makes it rather difficult to figure out the Middle Chinese initial from the modern Korean.

### Resources

There are good books and references on this subject. I recommend [Jerry Norman's *Chinese*](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0521296536) for a basic overview of Chinese historical phonology. At least, I liked it when I read it in college. Wikipedia has a [decent article on Chinese historical phonology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology) and an [ok article on Sino-Japanese words](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary). Also, I often refer to [this chart of Middle Chinese sound correspondences](https://www.frathwiki.com/Chinese_sound_correspondences). You can also just get a sense of how things tend to work by looking up the Middle Chinese, Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese pronunciations of characters when you have a question about a correspondence. After seeing a bunch of them, you'll figure out plenty of rules of thumb even if you never learn anything about historical phonology.

### username_4's Rules of Thumb

Here are some rules of thumb I often use when learning Japanese (and already knowing Mandarin and having some random historical Chinese phonology knowledge):

* For vowels, you just have to guess. Going from Mandarin backwards to Middle Chinese and then forward to Japanese is just too lossy for vowels. At the very least, I have not found it productive to try and memorize information about Middle Chinese vowel correspondences. I basically just guess that it's a front vowel (i, e) or a back vowel (a, o, u) based on the Mandarin.
* There are two very important pieces of Middle Chinese information that have been lost in Mandarin. I think it's worth keeping track of this stuff when it comes up, as it's so important for guessing pronunciations in Japanese (or Cantonese or whatever). The first is final stop consonants (入声) `p`, `t`, and `k`. Almost every language you'd care to learn other than Mandarin preserves these to some extent. The second is for pinyin `j` and `q` whether they originally came from an affricate or from a velar stop. E.g., 青岛 was once `cingdao` (or "tsingtao" as they spell it on the beer), but 重庆 was once `chongking` (or "chungking" as they spelled it in Hong Kong). `cing` and `king` merged into `qing`. In Japanese, the kan-on readings for those characters are `sei (せい)` and `kei (けい)`. If you knew whether it was velar, you have a shot, and if not, you're just guessing whether it's an `s` or a `k` in Japanese. You don't have to memorize it for every character either--the phonetic components of the characters are consistent about this (青 series always has initial affricate in MC, 合 series always have a final `p` in MC, etc.).
* Middle Chinese had three final nasals (`m`, `n`, and `ng`). Mandarin merged `m` into `n`, and so did Japanese when borrowing them. But the final `ng` in Mandarin corresponds to long vowels in Japanese. 光 is `guāng` in Mandarin but `kou (こう)` in Japanese. One thing that's a bit confusing is that final `p` also ended up becoming a long vowel too, so the 合 in 都合 is pronounced `gou (ごう)` rather than `gopu` or `gofu` or whatever it was historically. When guessing *which* long vowel, the options in descending order of commonness are: `*ou`, `*you`, `*ei`, `*uu`.
* Middle Chinese had a three-way distinction in voicing for stops. Unvoiced aspirated (like pinyin `p`), unvoiced unaspirated (like pinyin `b` or a French `p`), and voiced (like French `b`). Mandarin lost the distinction between unvoiced unaspirated and voiced. Japanese had a voicing distinction but not an aspiration one, so when borrowing, the first two categories were merged. This is sort of a pain in the ass when guessing Japanese pronunciations. I default to guessing unvoiced, but if the character is a second tone in Mandarin, then it should be voiced. E.g., 同乗 is `どうじょう` rather than `とうしょう` (both the characters are 2nd tone in Mandarin).
* You're never going to guess everything perfectly: between missing information in your source language, an inability to memorize all of historical phonology, along with true irregular exceptions, you will be wrong a lot. That's fine. If you're guessing sort of close to the right pronunciation, I find that it makes the memorization of the correct pronunciations a lot easier, since they're already in the ballpark of what I would expect. It's a lot easier for me than memorizing kun-yomi pronunciations anyways!

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Thank you for the answer. I know some Japanese but not enough to provide a thorough answer to this question. I learned a lot from you.  

---

