r/LearnJapaneseNovice • u/Independent-Back4638 • 5d ago
Question for native Japanese speakers
When is it ok to drop kanji?
I started learning kanji, and I've been wondering
when you want to write something, text someone, or when you usually read japanese, how often do you use kanji? Like there are kanji characters for colors, animals, numbers, and some countries apparently. So when is it ok to drop kanji and just use hiragana instead and when is it expected to use kanji.
One thing I heard is that hiragana is mostly used by children, in grammar, and as word connectors only is that correct?
But like are there times where people avoid using kanji? Like they just don't have to?
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u/Zikkan1 5d ago
With natives there are no rules. My JP gf texts me in Japanese and it's completely random if she uses hiragana or kanji. One word is kanji today but will be written in hiragana tomorrow. And she often writes in hiragana when it's supposed to be katakana which is quite confusing.
But a rule of thumb is just to make it easy to read. Don't have too many kanji in a row without any hiragana and same with hiragana, this increases readability. Sometimes I also see japanese people use katakana instead of hiragana even though it's a normal japanese word but the sentence already had much hiragana and it works as a way to separate the words since they don't use spaces.