Quote:
Originally Posted by anrakushi
nice to have us agreeing MMM, haha. I'm interested in nagoyankees view on this being Japanese.
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It is true that you will have problems reading newspapers, magazines, legal papers, etc. if you haven't mastered nearly all of the 常用漢字. This is why many Japanese kids work hard to learn them by the time they graduate from high school. They do so not because the government or schools tell them to, but because they just KNOW that kanji are unavoidable.
In our private lives, however, where we are communicating with friends and family, we tend to slack off and use slightly less kanji than we actually know. We do so on purpose. This may be the difference between Japanese and Chinese. We can always resort to using the kana where situations call for 'casualness'. To me, anrakushi's use of 未だ or 彼処 looks pretty ...hmm.. academic, especially the latter. And I'm not even that young (I've lived nearly half a century), either. Those words look unusually formal written with kanji mainly because their meanings aren't that 'important'. But then as anrakushi and MMM know, we wil never write a whole passage in kana. That will only kill our own eyes and hinder communiaction. So we will find a balance somewhere.
So the government can set up guidelines, but it can't come into your home and watch how you write anything.