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05-02-2011, 10:22 AM
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Your Japanese proficiency shall be in direct proportion
to your true interest in the Japanese Mind. 
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05-02-2011, 08:02 PM
How strict is this rule? I have found many of those words in the link Masaegu gave written in kanji in books (and not textbooks, but novels). A couple of people I write to in Japan regularly use 事 instead of こと (another one of those words in Masaegu's link).
暗闇の中 歩くしかねぇ everything’s gonna be okay 恐れることねぇ 辛い時こそ胸を張れ
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05-02-2011, 11:18 PM
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Also, the rule is in a state of flux. You'll find some older Japanese people still use kanji for certain things, while younger people (in their 30s and 40s) who may think using hiragana is superior. Masaegu falls into the latter group, while there is at least one Japanese member here who falls into the former (forget who, though...). I believe Sashimister and Nagoyankee have fallen into the latter group. I'm not sure about YuriTokoro and the others who post less often. I've seen a debate between a couple natives on this topic, too. There are some I think I can categorically say are very widely considered poor writing. Off the top of my head, 出来る. You should always write できる instead. The only time you can get away with using the kanji is basically when you write the word 出来事.
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05-03-2011, 01:59 AM
If you are going to learn to write kanji, you might as well learn the correct stroke order. For me like 100% of the stroke orders were counter intuitive... but the more I practice the more I've started to get a feel for it. I think putting more effort into spoken Japanese will help you learn basic kanji (it's weird, but that's how it worked for me). However, sometimes the more 'quirky' (no offense meant) stroke orders do tend to make a character more easily remembered.
If it's any consolation, I've met plenty of Japanese kids with terrible stroke order... and I think it's an indication of poor writing skills to be honest. I've noticed that a lot of Japanese kids have more trouble writing enough kanji rather than substituting what would usually be written in hiragana with its kanji equvilant... although I have seen that as well. But ya, Kyle that's interesting how you said that there are different groups of people who believe differently about these things. I suppose English is no different in that respect. I talked to a Japanese person who swears that stroke orders for certain kanji were different when they were growing up. I certainly have no idea though.
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05-03-2011, 06:18 AM
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おもしろい, as someone with your level of Japanese proficiency could tell from its sounds, is an originally Japanese word. We did not borrow it from Chinese. We had the word long before we first encountered the Chinese. Even though we did not have a writing system back then, the word existed. When we met the Chinese over 1,000 years ago and discovered kanji, we kind of went crazy over it. I would liken, to an extent, this to the recent popularity of kanji in the West among some people. We tried to write Japanese using kanji only but that never worked for obvious reasons such as the vast differences in pronunciation and grammar between Japanese and Chinese. The two langugaes are not even linguistically related to each other. This fact lead to the invention of the kana so we would be able to actually write Japanese for the first time in the history of our nation and its language. The word 面白い, as opposed to おもしろい, was a pure invention of some intellectual of that age. It probably looked good at first but its built-in problems were also there from the beginning because 面 means "face" and 白, "white" when the word's meaning is "funny". What was intended in assigning those two kanji was that if you see/hear something funny, you laugh and if you laugh, your face looks brighter. After over 1,000 years, many Japanese, scholars and amateurs alike, are wondering if we should keep these creative "inventions". Writing the originally Japanese word おもしろい as 面白い (= "white-face-esque ") carries a clearly different connotation from writing in kanji the words borrowed directly from Chinese, such as 天気、月光、可能、外国、感動, etc. Thus, those who are more conscious about these historical and linguistic matters, would prefer to write some words without using kanji. Those who could not care less would still have a choice. Everyone still has a way to write "funny" in Japanese. Who is to say which group is right? All I know is that we just disagree AND that I personally never will write おもしろい using kanji because it simply looks "wrong" to me. Besides, I always learned to write it in kana in school right here in Japan. Your Japanese proficiency shall be in direct proportion
to your true interest in the Japanese Mind.
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05-03-2011, 01:32 PM
Wow thank you very much. Your explanation open a wide new world in the writing system. I didn't know there were such way of thoughts...a deeper step into Japanese culture.
暗闇の中 歩くしかねぇ everything’s gonna be okay 恐れることねぇ 辛い時こそ胸を張れ
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05-03-2011, 02:46 PM
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For those of you who do not know what I'm talking about, Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, was a linguist by profession. Apparently he wasn't a huge fan of so many French words having pushed out Old English/Germanic words from the vocabulary, so he found ways around using so many French-based words. For example, Bilbo Baggins lives at "Bag End." This is obviously a Germanic-originated English word. The modern English word is "cul-de-sac," which is French for, literally, "bag end/bottom." This is a cul-de-sac: File:Cul-de-Sac cropped.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (for some reason the IMG tags aren't working for me right now so I can't embed it) This is the type of street Bilbo's Bag End was. So we see Tolkien finding ways to use Germanic English words over Frankish English words. Anyway, just a tangent.
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