Sometimes I come across a word whose entry on jisho.org says "usually written using kana alone", such as 下さい vs ください. What exactly does this "usually" mean? Does it mean that as a learner of Japanese I should never bother writing it with kanji? Or are there actually situations where I might have to use the kanji? This is a general question, not just about ください but about any word with that note, eg. 美味しい vs おいしい.
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13 years ago
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Well I'm no expert, but I've heard from natives that writing some things in kanji can make you sound like a nerd (their words ;D). For example:
此処 其処 彼処 etc...
But then you've got a lot of kanji that are less obscure, like 有る、居る、下さい、etc. I've noticed that at least when typing, the older Japanese tend to talk to me using more kanji that I don't otherwise usually see written out, using things like:
有難うございます 沢山 貴方 頂いて
I can't say for sure but I have a feeling that using kanji like these doesn't make you sound like a nerd, but it somewhat raises the formality/politeness of your writings.
I think it's important to keep in mind though that handwritten and typed Japanese can be two different animals, as there's quite a difference between hitting Spacebar to turn ご馳走様 into kanji, and having to write it out by hand.
My advice is to not worry about it too much, you will begin to notice the trends for each word as you get more exposure to different types of people using them in different contexts. I don't think anyone is ever going to look down on you because you wrote this word in kanji, or that word in hiragana.
As for learning to write the obscure kanji, I'd say skip them for now until you master more of the common ones - but it is useful to be able to recognize them, at least.
I'd say the medium you're using can also play into it - I see 美味しい or 美味い fairly frequently in books, but almost never on, say, variety TV. Largely it comes down to how formal/pretentious you want to sound.
Some words also tend to be written in kana because of the kanji's connotations. One of my professors mentioned that ください, for instance, is usually written without the kanji because 下 may suggest that you are looking down on someone - not really the nuance you want when making polite requests.
[quote author=できるだけ link=topic=1516.msg9003#msg9003 date=1329441972] Some words also tend to be written in kana because of the kanji's connotations. One of my professors mentioned that ください, for instance, is usually written without the kanji because 下 may suggest that you are looking down on someone - not really the nuance you want when making polite requests. [/quote]
I find that interesting considering it's the opposite point of view; you are the one being looked down upon. It's almost as if you're saying "I humbly ask that you hand down this favour to my lowly presence" kind of deal hahah Such is the monster that is keigo.
like everyone's been saying, there's a lot of factors on whether a lot of common words are actually written in kanji or not - like the formality, the age of the person (older people tend to use more kanji), and the medium. Personally I love kanji so I learn them anyway, but I would probably suggest learning them more to recognize, and not necessarily to write. For example, I work at an elementary school in Japan, and when I was creating curriculae for the English program here, I made lesson plans in Japanese to use with the homeroom teachers I work with. I thought it would be best to use lots of kanji - it's being made for teachers, there's limited space, and I'm typing it on the computer so it's jsut as fast - but there were a whole bunch of kanji I was told not to use - one that stood out in my mind was they told me not to write あいさつ in kanji (挨拶), because 'that kanji just isn't used in elementary schools'. Weird, but that's how it was.
Thank you all for your answers. At least I know there are no hard and fast rules which I thought I might have been missing. Actually it has now ocurred to me that a Japanese corpus would be good source of information about this because you would be able to search for the word in kana and kanji and compare what percentage there is various types of text. Will have to look around whether there is an easily accessible Japanese corpus.
Yeah, I just stick to what Denshi Jisho says if I'm checking the meaning there, haha. I don't think anyone will get up in arms about our choice of kanji vs. hiragana. If it looks tricky, skip the kanji for now. That's pretty much what I do. I thought it was cool to try and learn 蝸牛 (かたつむり) or 天道虫 (てんとうむし), but it turns out that they really aren't written with kanji that often. Even school teachers don't know whether some words are more commonly written as kanji, hiragana or even katakana - especially when it comes to animals.
Just be glad that we don't have to learn all the kanji for country names and the like. Until you have mastered the 2k-odd 常用漢字, isn't is wise to just choose what feels comfortable to you and forgo focusing too much on whether Japanese people use this or that? Ask any Japanese person if they can write certain kanji used in the newspaper, and some will say no, while others will say yes. The average adult can read them all, sure; but that doesn't necessarily mean they can write them or even know the correct pronuncation!
Tricky system, but very cool. I love kanji, despite being a real noob still (though far better than a couple of years ago). And it interests me just which words are more commonly written using one or the other of the kanas. ;)
I run into this problem all the time, and indeed, even native Japanese teachers aren't always sure. I've had times when a couple of days after enquiring about a specific word and being told I should write it in hiragana, I see the same word in a Japanese text (a modern one, too) written in kanji.
As far as certainties go though, the only one seems to be not to write grammatical structures with kanji. E.g. a normal いる written in kanji for "is, exists" might look strange (and make the reader think whoever wrote this was ancient), but a kanji in a ～ている structure would look completely out of place.
