[krackers]

That's interesting, because people always say that furigana is a "crutch" when learning Japanese vocabulary, but it would seem the be the natural correspondence of what you mentioned (namely first learning spoken japanese with furigana and then later associating the words you know with the kanji). Maybe the larger number of homophones (with lack of tones to distinguish between them) makes this less effective?

[musicale]

Furigana seems like a great idea to me and extremely useful. I expect that native learners use it and benefit from it.

Also I expect the onyomi/Chinese readings of many kanji might fall into phonetic groups as they do in the hanzi. (Note also that kanji and hanzi are basically the same word with some phonetic shifts.) Apparently onyomi actually means "sound reading."

[livueta]

Yeah, 音読み - literally sound-reading.

There definitely is a phonetic element to it. Since most/many complex words (jukugo) you'll encounter are formed from the same ~2k kanji, you often end up quite literally sounding it out. As a simple-ish example, 音読み itself: 音 is read 'on', 'in' or 'son' in descending order of frequency. 読's usual onyomi is 'doku', but the み ('mi') at the end clues you in that this is a on-kun jukugo, where the second kanji uses the kunyomi reading because... nevermind. Anyway, kunyomi is... 'yomi', so, onyomi.

It's plenty complicated in practice with all kinds of stuff messing you up (multiple onyomi, nonstandard readings of all kinds, rendaku, etc.) but fundamentally you're operating phonetically, at least when you first encounter the written form of a word you probably have heard before.

On furigana: it's useful but also absolutely can be a crutch. Although you're generally going to want to acquire jukugo vocab from various sources and not just sound everything out after learning common kanji, that process of phonetically processing a compound word is a great workout for your fundamental kanji knowledge. On top of that, for whatever reason, I find it makes me feel like I've comprehended the text when I actually haven't, like the kid in the article with the dog story, though in this case it's lack of understanding through phonetic over, rather than under, emphasis. At least personally, it's easy to rip through the furigana reading and have my brain be like "yep, just turned all of those symbols into sounds, job done." That's probably part of why many resources, like https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/, allow you to quickly toggle them. Open a story and hit the 漢字の読み方を消す button.

[soraminazuki]

> Furigana seems like a great idea to me and extremely useful. I expect that native learners use it and benefit from it.

So true, especially when you encounter a proper noun that includes kanjis. It's almost impossible to guess how to read them, even for native speakers, because the usual rules surrounding how to read kanjis are largely ignored when it comes to proper nouns.