Regarding the lack of spaces and kanji in Japanese, everyone and their dog, simply just says that, “ kanji helps break up words” and that’s it but in many places online, prrvix for example I always end up seeing a lot of Japanese written mostly in kana, sometimes solely in kana alone. わis is a random excerpt of a dialogue in a fan art,
「そんなのどっちでもいいわよとかく」
[link to dialogue](https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=3355524)
But, other places on the web when asked the same question say, “reading Japanese in only kana is hard itislikethisinenglish. So we need kanji” and that is their answer with no further explanation. So what is going on with kana only? It see it a lot. It seem like people are saying one thing but what I actual find is something else. Is this what people say when they mention that if you don’t write in kanji you come off as illiterate? That you just use kanji where you can, sometimes words or phrases are more normal to write in kana and that depending on the word choice in why what is being written many words can all end up next to each other all in kana? But it that’s the case then should’t a good writer go back and add in kanji to break things up?
Please tell me if this post makes sense or not and I will edit it. This is just my thoughts and why I’m unsure.
(Or do you simply have to have a large enough vocabulary and familiarity with Japanese and are expected to just know where words are?)
Thanks.
6 comments
Kanji does *help* break up words and many people would say it makes the language more visually elegant, but the fact is that any native or proficient speaker is not going to have any trouble reading a string of kana like the one you posted, since the breaks in words are completely clear to anyone with a command of the language.
If you had a sentence filled with 漢語 with numerous possible homophones forced into all kana — sure, that would be difficult and annoying to read. But it’s not like removing kanji will immediately render any Japanese sentence inscrutable. (Think about it for a second — if it was, Japanese could not function as a spoken language because kanji don’t appear in the air when people speak.)
And with your English example, I bet you have no trouble reading that despite the lack of spaces. You know where to break up the words because *you know the words.* It’s the same with Japanese.
Particles help in situations like this.
In kana only texts and games there are usually spaces. But there does occur the occasional hiragana only sentence like the one you mentioned.
Some of it is also just being familiar with words.
Itsliketypinglikethis
ButalsothereSBJareVBpartsofspeechindicatorsOBJ
Like the SBJ/VB/OBJ I put here, it helps break things up slightly but still takes some getting used to.
The thing you said about some words being more natural to write in kana is exactly that. Some common words, phrases, conjunctions, etc are just more commonly written in kana and so depending on the sentence, it may be all kana.
Ok so lets break things down first
1. Hiragana has a more round shape that allows an easy reading when all of them are together.
2. Native speakers don’t need to know grammar in depht because it’s their language they only transcribe what they want to say as we do in english.
3. In complex narratives or texts kanji is a must because there are a lot of lines and paragraphs but when it comes to single and basic text lines it’s understandable purely by context.
4. You need to learn more grammar in order to understand more abstract ideas and then be able to just transcribe what you want to say.
5. You also need more reading practice so you can start to read as you read latin alphabet, in other words, you need to understand written words at first sight as you’re doing right now.
Is it hard? Maybe but that’s why you need to practice and study, practice and study and so on. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when your a begginer but you’re gonna start to see results after a year if you practice daily.
So don’t give up
And that image made me laugh. It’s funny how the would interact with each other lol
just wanted to add something here that some people may not have touched on. The kanji-kana thing in writing is a spectrum.
More educated writing ( like legal, or scientific things ) is going to basically be all kanji ( look at any science or medical wiki page )
“血液 – Wikipedia” https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%A1%80%E6%B6%B2
, however less formal tends towards more kana. Doujins, Manga, Children’s writing and the like.
Not to mention that certain characters in manga/writing probably “speak” with kanji to seem more educated and vice versa
Beyond the lack of spaces, Japanese has a lot is homonyms and kanji are very helpful for cleaning those up in writing. English does this too but to a lesser extent. One perspective I’ve heard explained it something like:
Ewe Cannes reed this butt wood ewe wont two sine uh document that looked like this.