[hatsuto11]

Originally Posted by duo797

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.

Just as you mentioned, the context can clarify anything.... But I don't really understand how is that related to 'anata'. Obviously that word cannot be read in a different way!
Furthermore, I am still totally persuaded that Japanese was formerly written using Kanji ONLY. And the best evidence for that is the 古事記 which was the first japanese book ever!
Since the Japanese did NOT have a way to write at first, they adopted the Chinese hanzi and started to write their own language using it following the Chinese grammar. Afterwards, they started to express the japanese grammatical patterns using phonetic hanzi and the language was still written using only hanzi at that time! But as you mentioned, women were finding it difficult to remember a very huge amount of kanji which was used at that time and consequently they innovated the kana.

As for what you mentioned (concerning whether it is a personal opinion or not....), i believe you are biased to the japanese alphabet and i don't know why you really are Have ya ever thought of the origin of hiragana and katakana???? They didn't come from the air lol! They Japanese people simplified some phonetic kanji into those silly letters and you can check that in wikipedia if you want. The beauty of the japanese script is in its kanji and there's no use defending hiragana which made japanese look simple and hid its beauty!
Even though the US tried to get rid of them after it defeated japan post WW2 forcing the japanese people to reduce their number, Japan NEVER EVER stopped using them and they tried to protect them as much as they could. i believe that Kanji is not entirely chinese and it is an indispensable part of the Japanese culture.
＊＊＊＊漢字＝文化
＊＊＊＊平仮名・片仮名＝戯言
Bear that in mind