JLPT N5 Kanji – 午, go, uma

This is 5-Minute Kanji, and today, we are going to go over a sword-fighting kanji: the kanji for noon.

Mnemonic:

UMA holds her sword up high and yells GO!

Onyomi:

ゴ
go

Kunyomi:

うま
uma

The onyomi is most often used to mean noon or relative to noon like in the words 午後ごご, afternoon or午前ごぜん, before noon or morning. The kunyomi, うま, is used almost exclusively in the Chinese zodiac to mean the sign of the horse. This reading will most likely not show up on the N5 test. The more standard kanji for a horse is 馬, which you won’t actually see until the N3 test.

Mnemonic Factory

This kanji started off, in Chinese, as a rough drawing for a pestle used to pound rice. It still kind of resembles a kind of hammer or pestle that you can use for a visual mnemonic. Others imagine it as a horse rearing back from being startled. Another option is that it resembles an analog clock when it strikes noon with both clock hands straight up. It can also look like a sword hilt, which I used for the mnemonic I created.

For onyomi, you can do a lot with ご. Of course, the simple word ‘go’ works in a lot of cases.  However, you also have GOpher, GOld, or GOal. You could imagine a GOpher riding a horse that is rearing back like Napolean crossing the Alps.

The kunyomi, うま, doesn’t have a lot of words in English that sound familiar to it. There is the famous actress Uma Thurman that you can use, but other than that there are not a lot of options. You could use derivatives of human though: hUMAn, hUMAnitarian, etc…

 

Example Words

How about a few example words where this kanji is used?

Onyomi
There are three common words that use the onyomi – 午前ごぜん, 正午しょうご, and 午後ごご. 午前ごぜん is literally before noon, but refers to the morning (6 am-noon). 正午しょうご is high noon or 12:00. 午後ごご is used for afternoon. There is also another handy word that you might see often – 午前中ごぜんちゅう. This refers to during the morning, and you’ll often see it on redelivery requests when you miss a package delivery.

Kunyomi
As I said earlier the うま reading is only used to refer to the Chinese zodiac symbol for horse. It is not used outside of that context.

Commonly confused with

千 – thousand
半 – half
先 – before, previous
年 – year
毎 – every

Story Review

Can you remember the story from the beginning? Let’s give it a try, and yell out the words that are missing.

___ holds her _____ up high and yells __!

Perfect? Let’s give it another try.

___ holds her _____ up high and yells __!

Word Review

Can you read these? I’ll give you the kanji and please yell out the reading for each word

午前

正午

午後

午前中

午*

*Not an N5 word
That’s it for the kanji for noon. Please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions. If you’d like to learn more kanji, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell mark to get a notification every time I send out a new video. Also, be sure to check out my other 5 Minute Kanji videos.

Download the Kanji PDF and Take the Quiz