This has to be the most daunting thing about Japanese for me – I look at sentences and just wonder “where do I use kanji vs kana?” so having this cleared up would be very helpful. Thank you.
As you can see, it’s chock full of kanji, but it has a lot of kana too.
As a general rule, a lot of adverbs use kana, loanwords and various types of words that are kind of related to loanwords are katakana, as are made-up fantasy words. Besides that, other words tend to use kanji at least a little.
Some words are a mix of kanji and kana as well. This tends to be the case with a lot of verbs for instance, but not する verbs as much.
But with kanji, all the rules are made to be broken.
In the absolutely broadest possible sense, kana (read: hiragana) are used for the grammatical elements of a sentence, and kanji are used for nouns, verbs (but not their endings, as those are the “grammar”), etc. Katakana are used for loanwords that aren’t from Chinese, or used for style purposes. This is super oversimplifying it, but if you haven’t started studying Japanese yet it at least gives you some idea of what to expect. The question is kind of too broad to properly answer. I’d recommend getting a textbook like Genki I to introduce you to the basics; it’s easier to figure out what sort of questions you need to ask when you have a baseline of knowledge to work with already!
Don’t worry about that. Early on worry “What does this word/sentence/paragraph” means and build up reading a lot. With immersion, you get a grasp of when natives use kana vs kanji in a more intuitive way.
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If you read books, it will become super obvious to you.
But without that it’s a lot of hand-waving and opaque explanations.
Here is a picture I took of some random book on my shelf:
https://imgur.com/a/GzrNVl7
As you can see, it’s chock full of kanji, but it has a lot of kana too.
As a general rule, a lot of adverbs use kana, loanwords and various types of words that are kind of related to loanwords are katakana, as are made-up fantasy words. Besides that, other words tend to use kanji at least a little.
Some words are a mix of kanji and kana as well. This tends to be the case with a lot of verbs for instance, but not する verbs as much.
But with kanji, all the rules are made to be broken.
In the absolutely broadest possible sense, kana (read: hiragana) are used for the grammatical elements of a sentence, and kanji are used for nouns, verbs (but not their endings, as those are the “grammar”), etc. Katakana are used for loanwords that aren’t from Chinese, or used for style purposes. This is super oversimplifying it, but if you haven’t started studying Japanese yet it at least gives you some idea of what to expect. The question is kind of too broad to properly answer. I’d recommend getting a textbook like Genki I to introduce you to the basics; it’s easier to figure out what sort of questions you need to ask when you have a baseline of knowledge to work with already!
Don’t worry about that. Early on worry “What does this word/sentence/paragraph” means and build up reading a lot. With immersion, you get a grasp of when natives use kana vs kanji in a more intuitive way.