First opened Friday, October 5, 2007
学ぶ
まなぶ
- flat (heiban)
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
to learn; to study
Manabu is 真似 (mana, “imitating, copying”) plus ぶ (-bu, “to seem like, to act like”): “to learn” as “to imitate”.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 学
In a sentence
長生きして学べ。
Live and learn.
人は経験から学ぶ。
People learn from experience.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From 真似(まな) (mana, “imitating, copying”) + ぶ (-bu, “to seem like, to act like”, verb-forming suffix). Cognate with 学ぶ (manebu).”
- Hedged“The initial mana might be a phonetic shift from mane, itself the continuative or stem nominal form of classical verb 真似 (manu, “to imitate, to copy”), from 真 (ma-, “true, real”) + 似 (nu, “copy, imitate”, lower bigrade conjugation; not attested in isolation).”
- “First cited in the Nihon Shoki of 720.”
- “The ぶ (-bu) suffix usually conjugated with the upper bigrade pattern (上(かみ)二(に)段活用(だんかつよう) (kami nidan katsuyō)), and manabu conjugated this way until the early Heian period (early 800s). Starting from the mid-Heian (roughly the 900s or 1000s), manabu shifted to conjugate using the classical yodan pattern, the precursor to the modern godan conjugation (五段活用(ごだんかつよう) (godan katsuyō)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 学ぶ (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.