The dictionary Jisho lists lots of food items like 西瓜 (すいか watermelon) as being usually written using kana alone. I don’t know if this means that the kanji is just totally obscure or if I should study it. Being able to read Japanese novels is an end goal for me, and I am already learning lots of kanji through Anki and WaniKani as is. I am asking this question because I am currently putting together an Anki deck for the vocabulary brought up in my Japanese 101 class in the “Marugoto” workbook. I’m curious whether or not the kanji is worth learning.
4 comments
I would say: the more you know, the better?
Especially in novels, there is a notoriously irregular way of using kanji, kana and hiragana at times for words you usually learnt kanji only so far. You can always only benefit of knowing more kanji/vocab.
Dictionaries like [Kanshudo](https://www.kanshudo.com) have a category of frequency and which kanji or way of writing is usually used.
I think I’ve only seen kana
It probably doesn’t hurt, but unless you also plan to concurrently learn Chinese, learning the kanji for food items that are normally written in kana is probably not going to be of too much benefit. There’s a reason it’s labeled as such in jisho after all.
Basically just start reading, foods you encounter written in kanji, learn the kanji. Foods you encounter written in kana, learn the word w/out kanji.
If you see it one way one time and another way another time, you have to learn the kanji.
You’re going to be looking up a bajillion words anyway and lots of them have “sometimes in kanji sometimes in kana” status