Which is better? (Hand)writing the kanji as from your memory, which you know is one stroke or two off, yet people would understand it by context; writing hiragana instead, even when most people would write kanji in this word.

3 comments

1. If I was living in Japan I’d write the kanji— people are used to poor handwriting, and like you said there is context. A lot of the strokes run together anyway.

   Writing all in kana seems weird. Unless you’re writing a note for an elementary or preschooler?

2. I saw a survey of Japanese people once. Most said they would look it up. But some did said they would give up and write in kana. Mixed isn’t unheard of even in Sino-Japanese words, though usually because of rare characters or characters with undesirable connotations (信ぴょう性/信憑性 is an example of the former, 障がい者/障害者 an example of the latter).

3. For reference, in my office, Japanese natives seemed to handwrite their own notes principally with kanji; on occasion some of the kanji were slightly off or replaced with kana.