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Japanese: more Hiragana than Kanji? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5191 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes  Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 1 of 2 26 November 2015 at 7:17pm | IP Logged |
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So I've been learning Japanese on and off for about two years now, but the last few months I've been studying seriously, enough to read let's say Wikipedia with a dictionary. But my comprehension aside, here's what I have a pet peeve with:
Some words in Japanese can be written in Kanji or have a Kanji component, but are usually written in Hiragana. And writing those words in Kanji is considered rare, archaic or overly formal. For instance, 御早う御座います is usually written おはようございます; demonstrative pronouns e.g. 其れ、此の、何処, are usually written それ、この、どこ; words like 林檎、蜜柑、結構, are written りんご、みかん、けっこう. I mean, have Japanese people become lazy over the last 100 years or are there some good reasons not to write any possible word that can be written with Kanji, with Kanji?! I'm furious at the thought, because I love Kanji! Edited by Delodephius on 26 November 2015 at 7:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4560 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 2 of 2 27 November 2015 at 11:02am | IP Logged |
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There are lots of reasons why a writer chooses to write any given word in kanji or kana, but I guess the major reason why not every word that can be written in kanji is written that way is that, as far as most Japanese people are concerned, there is such a thing as the right balance between kanji and kana in a sentence. If a sentence contains next to no kanji it becomes hard to parse, which is why a lot of all-kana texts actually have spaces between words. However, if there are too many kanji the text becomes "overloaded" and harder to process. This is the main reason why demonstrative pronouns and other words and particles that are seen as serving a primarily grammatical function aren't written in kanji much these days. The more formal registers of writing do require more kanji usage, but even there the balance needs to be taken into consideration: when I was practising writing business e-mails on lang-8 I've had よろしくお願いいたします corrected to 宜しくお願い致します when I used it as a standalone phrase, only to get the opposite correction when I used it as part of a longer kanji-heavy sentence. Other reasons not to use kanji in certain situations include words containing kanji that are rare or outside the 常用漢字 list (隠ぺい without 蔽, or 裂か水 without 罅), not wanting to come across as overly formal/distant (おねがい is more acceptable in a friendly text message than お願い or, God forbid, 御願い), or the word in question having a different nuance when written in kana (e.g. literal vs figurative/abstract, as in 時 vs とき or 所 vs ところ). Here is a good summary of those rules and conventions.
It should be noted that this isn't an entirely modern phenomenon. While some classical works, such as 今昔物語, do use kanji pretty much whenever it's possible, when it comes to classical poetry the use and non-use of kanji often seems even more arbitrary than in modern day fiction. Edited by vonPeterhof on 27 November 2015 at 11:05am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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