I am a beginner at Japanese so I don’t get it, but in a lot of contexts I am seeing for example このまま instead of この儘, or なれた instead of 馴れた, or とき instead of 時, even when in the last case the phrase is このときに and I found it written exactly like that and not with the Kanji like この時に. In this last case, is it because it’s like a syntagm or something and so it’s better to write it in full in Hiragana? Why not use the Kanji instead? Is it because the menaing is clear so you can just use the Hiragana directly because the (correct) Kanji is already implied? What determines when to use the Kanji in writing and when to use the Hiragana? Can someone please explain it to me?
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it’s idiomatic, some are commonly written with kanji, some are not. some are because the kanji is complex and hard to read or write. some are just uncommon kanji (like 儘). when learning new words, look up sentence examples to see whether they’re typically written with kanji or not.
This is heavily dependent on the sort of texts you’re reading. If you read a text that’s targeted towards younger people, you’ll see more hiragana. If you read a newspaper, which is targeted towards an adult readership, you’ll see more kanji.
For some examples like 事 vs ことit could be that the author is referring to a physical thing vs an intangible thing.
Nobody but aspiring authors writes この儘… no, I take that back, *nobody* writes この儘; aspiring authors write 此の儘 … but nobody else does. (Successful authors are made to stop doing that by their editors).
Newspapers, serious novels, and advanced non-fiction books will use kanji for many words, but mostly the usage is either to save space or provide clarity of meaning. (儘 over まま *would* save a character, but 儘 is a very heavy kanji for a very ‘everyday’ word, so people are used to seeing it in kana because nobody is writing 儘 on a postcard.)
馴れる and 時 are normally written in kanji, but they may be written in kana if aiming at a younger audience, writing dialogue for a character who is young and/or not very literate (the kana/kanji ratio of dialogue implies something about tone of speech), if the current passage is already very kanji dense and the writer feels a need to ‘lighten’ it by using more kana, and of course, when handwriting because those extra strokes are easy enough when typing but can be tiresome when handwriting. Among other reasons that I might not be thinking of.
In the end, there’s a lot of words that are usually kanji, and others that are usually kana, but even more that are really the writer’s choice. The exact reasoning for any particular choice is often unknowable.