Quote:
Originally Posted by hatsuto11
Look, you might be right about the wrong usage of the particle 'de'. Yes that's right, i should use 'ga' because 'de' makes no sense there. As for mitaini, I don't know if you are right or wrong! Maybe you are better than me in using that word  I mean, it may be unsuitable to use it in that context as you mentioned. Can ya plz tell me with wut i can replace it?
As to 貴方, i don't think that Japanese might have any rules that prevent me from writing it with kanji! It is not wrong! for instance, the word kawaii can sometimes be written as:かわいいand sometimes they write is as:可愛い. I don't think that you can consider that a mistake! Do never forget that Japanese was formerly written using kanji ONLY. And kanji is the main element in the japanese script. Those characters are the source of the concept themselves! Anyway, thx 4 ur notes |
Actually, it was CHINESE that was written using only Hanzi before, and in the times when stories like the Tales of Genji were written, male intellectuals wrote using Chinese, not Japanese. I'm not entirely up on my history of Hiragana, but I'm pretty sure that it was an adaptation that women used so they had a way to communicate and was later adopted by men too.
Quoting the wiki article on
The Tales of Genji:
As with most Heian literature, the Genji was probably written mostly (or perhaps entirely) in kana (Japanese phonetic script) and not in Chinese characters because it was written by a woman for a female audience. Writing in Chinese characters was at the time a masculine pursuit; women were generally discreet when using Chinese symbols, confining themselves mostly to pure Japanese words.
There is no explicit rule that you can't use as much kanji as you want, but for the same reason that it is considered incorrect and awkward for me to write in elizabethan english, native Japanese speakers don't use kanji for everything. Even with my limited experience reading Japanese, I've seen あなた written in kanji only a few times, and it was for a more complex purpose than 'using kanji for kanji's sake'.
Another reason you don't always use kanji is that one compound can have multiple readings. The easiest example for me to think of is 今日. When I see 今日 my first instinct is *always* that it is read きょう but another way to read it is こんにち. The salutation こんにちは！ will sometimes be written by beginners as 今日は！ and even though I'm not a native speaker as I'm reading I always expect there to be more sentence following, as in 今日は雨が降りました (Today it rained). Don't get me wrong, any native speaker will realize from context that the speaker means こんにちは and not きょうは, but it can be a bit jarring and it disrupts the flow of the sentence. Just like in your own native language, the flow of a composition (or readability) goes a long way towards making you seem more natural.
Just one more time before I finish my post I want to emphasize: If Japanese was EVER written using only Kanji, it was almost immediately after they were introduced to Hanzi (Kanji) and the standard now is NOT all Kanji. Just because there is a Kanji for a word or compound does not mean it is considered correct to use it (I believe the yahoo.jp dictionary actually indicates when it's standard to write using ひらがな instead of 漢字 for a fair number of words). It's not always a matter of personal opinion, sometimes it's a matter of being proper or not.