I am quite new to learning Japanese. Ideas are welcome.

  1. How do Japanese speakers pronounce Chinese characters? Do they need to remember all the pronunciations of a single Chinese character? And then what? Try to match to figure out the actual meaning?

  2. In a Japanese verb/adj, what do Chinese characters mean in a Japanese speaker's eyes? For a Chinese speaker it means and relates to something.

  3. 慌ただしい and 慌しい are the same, but with different appearances. And the 慌 is pronounced differently. Why not 慌い , which could save some writing?

* * *

I do not want to just remember all the combinations of kanji and their
corresponding pronunciation and meaning, but I would like to be able to
understand which combinations go together, and which do not, as well as how to
derive the meaning from a combination of kanji depending on their
constituents.
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kanji okurigana
How Japanese speakers deal with Kanji reading/understanding
1. No, they understand them as words in their own language, because they are.
  2. It still has some meaning, but again, it's just a word.
  3. I believe this is called okurigana, and it changes what characters are part of the kanji. Some okurigana usages are more common than others. It's not a language all about practicality.

For this specific example, しい tends to form a class of i-adjectives that
indicate a human emotion.
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> How do the Japanese speakers pronounce the Chinese charactors ? Do they need
> to remember all the pronounciations of a single Chinese Charactor ? And then
> what ? Try to match to sigure out the actual meaning ?

They may be written the same way (for the ones that are used in Japanese, at
least), and have the same Unicode assignments; but in the context of Japanese
text, they are Japanese characters - i.e., 漢字{かんじ}, not 漢字{Hànzì}. Just like
how `chat` can either be English for a casual conversation or French for a
cat, and in a French text, they are French characters.

Native speakers learn Japanese pronunciation just like those of any other
native language: by immersion since childbirth (and reading of kanji by being
schoolchildren and being immersed in real-world text the rest of their lives).
Like in Chinese, in Japanese the characters fundamentally encode _meaning_.
(They may _also_ encode an on-reading. These are readings that are influenced
by the Chinese reading. For example, かん is supposed to sound like Hàn, and じ
like zì. But the word was imported into the Japanese language many centuries
ago, and there has been some drift since then. Anyway, a common example is 語,
which shares its on-reading of ご with the 五 in the top right.)

Typically, kanji in a Japanese text will either cluster in groups of four
(四字熟語{よじじゅくご} - literally four-character compounds) which can be either nouns
or stand-alone idioms; pair up (these are normally nouns, and normally use the
most common on-reading for each); or else are followed by okurigana
(indicating a verb or an i-adjective, possibly with further inflection).

So, for 自分 we recognize a common word じぶん, and 分 is simply read ぶん (the on-
reading is ふん, which becomes voiced by what is called 連濁 {れんだく}). For 分かる, we
again recognize the common verb, where 分 is read わ. Because it's a verb, the
kun-reading (native Japanese reading) is more likely. We recognize it as a
verb because of the okurigana.

> In a japanese verb/adj, what does the Chinese character mean in a Japanese
> speaker's eyes ? For Chinese speaker it means and relates to something.

To my understanding, as a rule it has a similar meaning. The root meaning of 分
has to do with splitting something up. Nouns containing it typically have a
meaning of some kind of portion of a whole. (For example, it's used to mark a
minute of time, because it's a small division of an hour - _just like_ the
English word minute, which shares a root with the adjective, minute (different
pronunciation!), meaning small.) The verb meaning, typically glossed with
words like "understand" or "become clear", is related: a complex thing becomes
understandable when it is broken down into pieces.

This meaning-awareness can inform reading. For example, 食欲{しょくよく} "appetite"
uses the very commonly seen 食 of 食｛た｝べる and the 欲 of 欲{ほ}しい ("usually kana"
per Jisho, but you'll at least see it all the time if you input text with an
IME). So to pronounce it, we need to think of words _that have the related
meanings_ (eating/food and desire), and then we come up with one that can
plausibly match known readings of the characters (しょく is very common for 食,
used in a lot of compound words). If you've already heard the word spoken and
know what it means, you can recall it when you see the kanji and the concepts
are called to mind.

However, I doubt that native Japanese speakers commonly _think_ about things
on this level. Being a native speaker of a language is a rather Zen practice.

> For 慌ただしい and 慌しい， they are the same. But with different appearences. And
> the 慌 pronouse differently. Why not 慌い , which could save some writing.

Fundamentally, the pronunciation of 慌 is あわ. Over time, it became acceptable
to leave out the ただ in writing, although you still pronounce it. My
understanding is that, typically, those skipped characters get folded into the
reading for the kanji, and they disappear completely as okurigana. However,
this is an organic process that takes a long time (like spelling or
pronunciation changes, or notions of acceptable grammar, in other languages).
In this particular case, it would be difficult, because the reading as あわ is
reinforced by the existence of the verb form 慌てる.

That said, most seemingly "extra" okurigana are there because historically,
they were not "extra". i-adjectives ending in しい are the common example, as
already noted; most of these indicate human emotions (think 美味｛おい}しい, 悲{かな}しい,
懐{なつ}かしい, 欲{ほ}しい...). This is considered a pretty important distinction.
Another common case is 食{た}べる: it used to be that the べ could change with
inflection.
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>   1. How do Japanese speakers pronounce Chinese characters? Do they need to
> remember all the pronunciations of a single Chinese character? And then
> what? Try to match to figure out the actual meaning?
>

No, they first learn **words** along with their pronunciations. Kanji is the
last thing they learn. That's why a 3 year old kid can speak fluent Japanese
without knowing any kanji (or even hiragana). Average Japanese speakers don't
know how many ways 生 can be pronounced, but they can easily pronounce 生【いき】霊,
生【なま】卵, 生【せい】活, 一[生]【しょう】, 生【き】娘 and so on without thinking because they
recognize text based on words. See also: [日曜日，the different meanings and
pronunciations of 日](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/68850/5010)

>   2. In a Japanese verb/adj, what do Chinese characters mean in a Japanese
> speaker's eyes? For a Chinese speaker it means and relates to something.
>

If you ask this to a Japanese speaker, they will say each kanji of course have
a meaning, but that doesn't mean they are always consciously aware of it in
daily readings/writings. Only when they encounter a totally new word, they
start to think about the meaning of each kanji (or even radicals of kanji).

On the other hand, hiragana and katakana represent only sounds, so they don't
have any specific meaning.

>   3. 慌ただしい and 慌しい are the same, but with different appearances. And the 慌
> is pronounced differently. Why not 慌い, which could save some writing?
>

The "technically correct" form is 慌ただしい【あわただしい】 because this word is
etyomologically from an old verb
[慌つ【あわつ】](https://kobun.weblio.jp/content/%E3%81%82%E3%82%8F%E3%81%A4)
(慌てる【あわてる】 in modern Japanese). However, the story of okurigana is very
complicated, and some words have customary variations and abbreviated forms.
慌しい is one of such variations. Although such variations arise naturally over a
long history, you cannot abbreviate okurigana as you like.
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These are interesting questions but ones that are difficult to answer. Let me
try, anyway.

If we take 慌 as an example, every native speaker who has learned it recognizes
it as, before anything else, the character for 慌てる. Suppose some of them
already know the word あわただしい but have never seen it written as either 慌ただしい or
慌しい. Chances are many would still manage to recognize it as あわただしい when they
first see it. The former is easier to guess because 慌 corresponds to the same
sound as in 慌てる, of course, but the latter is not that hard, either, because
あわてる and あわただしい are so close in both meaning and sound that the gap in
knowledge can be easily filled with the help of the Chinese character 慌.

Whether to write it as 慌ただしい or 慌しい is a matter of convention. The former
looks more familiar, and logical, to me precisely because the Chinese
character is associated with the same sound as in 慌てる, but the latter causes
me no trouble at all. Even if it were written as 慌い, my first guess would
still be あわただしい because I cannot think of another word that ends with い and
whose meaning seems to be better represented by the character 慌. The word is
simply not written that way.

Whether one knows how to read 恐慌 is a totally different story. This needs to
be learned separately. However, it obviously looks like an _on’yomi_ word,
guessing its pronunciation is not hard if one already knows 荒 is also
pronounced こう. This corresponds to a Chinese speaker guessing the
pronunciation of 慌 as _huāng_ from 荒. As for the meaning, many would correctly
guess from its Chinese characters that it has something to do with fear and
panicking even if they have never seen the word before.

Although 慌しい and 恐慌 are too easy for educated adults, we do sometimes have to
rely on similar guesswork when we are reading about unfamiliar topics. When we
run into an unknown word in Chinese characters, we are often able to guess its
meaning. In my case, I rarely bother to look it up in a dictionary and move on
reading if I can guess the meaning even if I am not completely sure how to
read it.

Some basic characters have many different readings. To cite a few extreme
examples, you need to learn how to read such words as 今日, 明日 and 明後日
individually. In these words, the character 日 is associated only with the
meaning of “day” and not with any particular sound. Though there happens to be
a common sound in [二日]{ふつか}, [三日]{みっか}, [四日]{よっか} and so on, the character 日
is still more strongly associated with the meaning of “day” than with the
sound か in these words for Japanese speakers.

The pronunciations of some proper nouns are simply impossible to guess. As an
example, you wouldn’t know how to read 日下部 unless you already know it.

Compared to Chinese, in which most characters represent one sound each,
Chinese characters in Japanese seem less strongly associated with sounds. I
have read about a type of dyslexia that affects a Japanese speaker’s ability
to read Chinese characters only, leaving their ability to read hiragana and
katakana intact. If my memory is accurate, the affected area of the brain is
different from the area a Chinese speaker uses to recognize Chinese
characters. It is close to, if not exactly matching, the area where people,
including Japanese speakers, recognize human faces. I have not been able to
find a good reference, though.
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