When to use Kanji instead of Hiragana and doubts on Textbook

12 comments

1. My assumption is that because it is a textbook they don’t want to scare away beginners with difficult kanji.
   You can indeed write all those words in kanji, as they often are.

   As a general rule:
   more kanji = more mature feeling sentence.
   However in the textbook case I belive it is strictly because *it is a textbook*.
   子供、椅子、不味い are very common kanji, you will encounter them frequently outside learning material.

   Edit: It’s also worth mentioning that 不味い is (当て字) ateji, (literally means “fill character”) that is; it doesn’t follow the conventional rules of onyomi and kunyomi. Another example why a textbook most likely would want to avoid introducing it.

2. there is no “generally”. every single word is different. look up sentence examples to see how words are used in real life. some are always written in kana, some always in kanji, and some are written depending on other context. there’s zero universal rules for this, it’s just part of learning a new word.

   textbooks might include official kanji even if it’s not used much just so you know what it is if you ever see it, and get a feel for the language. and some texts might leave out rare kanji or rare usages if they feel it impedes learning.

3. I don’t think there is a rule per-se, especially for 和語. There are many words that can be written in Kanji, but seldom are. So perhaps the textbook adopts the convention of using the most common way a certain word is written?

   I’ve seen both こども and 子供 used probably equally often in news articles, novels, etc. Honestly I’ve never seen まずい written as 不味い, even though the 2 kanji used are very common ones.

4. There are probably a few reasons, especially as u/Redditaccnam points out.

   Adding on to their comments:

   More kanji can make a reading seem technical, dull and academic (and intimidating?) even to native readers. Too many kana can be seen as childish. A good balance is supposedly 30% kanji to 70% kana. Keeping it omitting kanji may be a stylistic choice, which sometimes happens.

   According to Jisho, 美味しい is often written with kana alone too, but I think I’ve seen it in kanji more, overall. I can’t remember ever seeing まずい with kanji. Perhaps the more positive association of the kanji make it more acceptable to print (and adding sophistication to a product, as stated above – 美味しいベルギーチョコレート vs. おいしいチョコ).

   Let’s also look at differentiation of words too.

   I can only find two words related with the reading まずい, compared to きく, which has 5 verbs, plus various nouns and so on. Looking at JUST the nouns, 聞く, 聴く, 訊く, and 効くand 利くall have subtle shifts in meaning that are brought to the fore with their different kanji. まずい might not need that level of disambiguating.

5. The frustrating and boring answer is that you should use Kanji instead of Hiragana when it is appropriate or impactful to do so, and you will develop an intuition for when it is appropriate or impactful to do so through long term exposure to native materials.

   As extreme examples you can write いる as 居る, ある as 有る or 在る and ありがとう as 有難う. You would basically never do this however, as it would come off as incredibly stuffy pretentious. There are times when it makes sense, like when you’re writing some old style text, but it’s not the kind of thing you’d do when texting a friend.

   That said, in a lot of cases it’s usually better to know the Kanji version of the word as well just in case it gets used. For the specific ones you’ve given

   * I very rarely see 不味い so I would expect to see and use まずい primarily
   * 昼ご飯 or maybe 昼ごはん is what I most often see – as above 御 is a pretty heavy Kanji. It’s the Kanji for the お and ご honourific that you see in front of a lot of words. お金, お水 and so on. You’d very rarely see these written as 御金 or 御水 and in fact I don’t think I’ve seen it even once. In this case, it probably just looks a little weird because it’s the middle of the word. But this does happen with other words sometimes. That said, knowing the 御 Kanji is not really optional either.
   * こども and 子供 are both popular, so take your pick really
   * 椅子 vs いす is harder to judge, I feel like it’s one of those words where the frequency of people writing in Kanji has increased over time. But that’s entirely my subjective view that could be entirely wrong. Use whichever you want, and expect that you will need to know how to read 椅子.

   As you can see, it’s a bit “yes but also no” for every word. Your TL;DR is to just figure out what native Japanese speakers do then copy them.

6. Your textbooks will drift you towards more kanji words over time. Don’t worry as you will get a natural feel for kanji-kana. If a word is taught as kana then retaught as kanji, just learn the kanji as it is presented.

   まずい.

7. As others have said, you just have figure out what Japanese people use and copy that. There are no rules.

   I just wanted to chime in with the common usages I see in daily life in Japan. So, signs etc. wich is a bit different from the common usage in literature, which I think is the main touch point for a lot of people here.

   美味しい in ads おいしい in text messages

   子ども

   いす or イス

   まずい

   昼ごはん or 昼ご飯

8. You’ve got a lot of great replies already, so I won’t repeat what they’ve said. But I want to add one resource when you feel unsure. A dictionary, for example [jisho.org](https://jisho.org) (I don’t know about other dictionaries yet, if they have the same information). If you write a word there it has a line on some of them “**Usually written using kana alone**” which is a good pointer that suggest how to use the word. Of course you may use kanji if you want, but at least you have a suggestion now.

   I uploaded two images here to show what I mean: [https://imgur.com/a/B03qbsu](https://imgur.com/a/B03qbsu)

9. i generally default to less kanji

10. >My textbook puts “tasty/delicious” as 美味しい, and ”Not tasty” as まずい。

    Not tasty is just not tasty. Mazui is inedibly bad.

11. For any word you can look it up in a dictionary like jisho and it says if it’s usually written in kana or in kanji

12. It depends on the word and on the context. Some words are nearly always written in kanji, and some are nearly always written in hiragana, and there’s a wide spectrum between those two extremes. A good dictionary will tell you if a word is usually kana, but it’s unfortunately often a judgement call.

    One rule to remember though, is that auxiliary verbs (verbs that come right after the 〜て form of another verb) should always be written in hiragana. The exception that you often see is people writing 〜て下さい instead of 〜てください, but I think this is either to save space or out of laziness.

    Another rule I try to follow is, if, when a word is written in kanji, it can be confused with another word (especially another word which is more common than the word I’m writing), write it in hiragana.

    And one rule which many people follow is to use only Jinmeiyou or only Jouyou kanji. I don’t worry too much about this one myself, though. Especially Jouyou – there are many common kanji that most people can read that aren’t in that list.