A quick scanning through of the jp Wikipedia on the topic and the first few links however seem to suggest otherwise.
「日本語は、通常の文章では、空白（スペース）によって語を区切ることはない。」
Personally I never paid much attention to spaces because textbooks and learning materials in general don’t have them.
What are your own thoughts on this?
8 comments
I think there’s no reason to make another thread about this. But if I recall correctly the post was about Hiragana only-content. And your Wiki page goes on to say: 日本語の通常の文章は仮名漢字交じりなので、漢字、カタカナ、ひらがな等の文字種の違いや、句読点や中点によって、語や文章の区切りを識別する so average Japanese writing wasn’t really relevant to the conversation, merely how Hiragana-only writing is dealt with.
May be worth pointing out that Jisho’s definition of 分かち書き is “separating words in Japanese with spaces (e.g. in kana-only books for children).”
when i watch stuff with subtitles i often see them use spaces where someone left out a particle
Yeah, definitely not common in normal text, however if you play a Pokemon game for example, you will see spaces as they use a lot of hiragana.
It’s rare to use 分かち書き for all sentences in a media.
But it’s common in Kana-only media for kids, video games, lyrics, waka/haiku, subtitles on movies, and telops.
​
And “spaces” are common in Japanese media.
For headlines
Newspapers：安倍元首相 撃たれ死亡
Packages of products：開けて９０日間 鮮度を保つ
Magazines：ふとした瞬間に現れる 上質な素材感とシルエット
For readability
katakana loanwords：現在、シークレット モードで閲覧しています。
Before/After alphabets：この作業は Windows が起動した状態で行ってください。
After ?： 「一日」は「いちにち」？ それとも「ついたち」？
Addresses：慶應義塾大学 日吉キャンパス 第４校舎独立館にて行います。
Names：山田 太郎
> after another reddit user was adamant on insisting spaces were “common” in normal usage of the language
Dude I get it that you are obsessed about the fact that someone (me) said Japanese often uses spaces in certain media, but this is starting to get ridiculous.
Just gonna leave [my previous posts about it](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/wdymlq/can_you_skip_kanji_no_will_you_learn_them_yes/iimvx6q/) with [plenty of evidence](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/wdymlq/can_you_skip_kanji_no_will_you_learn_them_yes/iimnrez/) of Japanese using spaces, just so people don’t misconstrue a weird argument that never happened. Yes, we get it, Japanese doesn’t use spaces in normal books, but Japanese exists as a language outside of books too.
Is night often spelled nite in English?
The answer to that is like the answer to your question. Night is spelled so regularly NITE (in certain contexts), that it is hard to say NITE is a misspelling.
But if you read it in a book or news article it stands out.
Also adding my common point, that Japanese people cannot agree at all on where to divide words up, which makes involved romaji communication a nightmare.
And yes there are still times where Romaji is used regularly as natives, though the rise of the iPhone has made that dramatically less common.
Used to be any email sent internationally, had to be sent in Romaji.
And those same problems of where you break the words also happen if it is written in native script.
Yari hajimeta? Yarihajimeru?
U mad?