Is it weird to write a word half kanji half hiragana?

A lot of words are written using two or more kanji. If I know only one of them, is it ok to write that one as kanji and the rest in hiragana? Or would that be weird for Japanese readers?

Example to clarify: weekend is 週末。Would it be ok to write しゅう末 or 週まつ?

Up until now, if there is one kanji I don‘t know in the word, I would write the whole thing in hiragana.

6 comments
  1. Even Japanese do this regularly with certain words with some difficult kanji, but I can’t remember any examples right now…

    It is a bit harder to read if the word is usually written in all kanji but would almost definitely be understood

  2. yes it’s fine. 1. there’s no instant fluency, just do what you can and improve over time. 2. for may words, even natives write it halfway, often because one of the kanji is just too complex or too uncommon.

  3. It would be weird if you typed it, since the Kanji is only a stroke of the space-bar away. It’s OK to do this if you don’t know the Kanji, but it would be preferable if you wrote them both. I would expect a native speaking adult to be able to do so, but if you’re learning people should be generous with you. Even with adults it’s understandable for very hard Kanji like 薔薇 but it’d be strange to see い見 or む中.

  4. Some words are just written like that anyway, usually because the kanji is uncommon. The example that comes to mind immediately is 田んぼ, where 圃 is written in its kana form instead as ぼ.

  5. That’s how kids learn to write here. They kearn all the words with a specific Kanji in them, and from then on they always write that part in Kanji. But they don’t know all the other parts of all these words yet, so they write them in Hiragana. Grade leveled books do the same.

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