Last night my Japanese teacher told the class that Japanese people don't like it when there's "too many kanji" in a paragraph because it's "hard to read".

But this doesn't quite jive with magazines I've looked at in the public library: the articles in them are densely packed with kanji (although the woman's magazine Fu Jin Ga Ho seemed to use more kanji than the men's magazine Men's Club, which seemed to overuse katakana words).

Does anyone have any links they could provide to current literature/discussion on this very topic? I feel confused now about the purpose/role of kanji now in present day Japan. Thanks.

Heh, I once got corrected at Lang-8 because I used 出来る instead of できる. :-)

I think your teacher means that you should avoid using kanji for words that are usually written in kana (e.g. using 沢山 instead of たくさん, or 流石 instead of さすが). But newspaper/magazine articles will continue using words like 非政府組織 because there's no other way to write "non-governmental organization" (the phrase "too many kanji" has different meanings for native Japanese speakers and for us learners...).

https://books.google.fi/books?id=ZY0nAAA...edir_esc=y

(The whole book (not that I've read it), not just the page I linked)

None of these are particularly academic, but here are a few things written by native speakers on the subject:

a guide to good writing style in Japanese: https://happylifestyle.com/600

another blog on effective writing: http://yoridokoro.biz/blog/writing-abili...ue/reader/

A guide on when to use kana over kanji: http://hajimeteweb.jp/column/web_writing/special2.php

RandomQuotes Wrote:another blog on effective writing: http://yoridokoro.biz/blog/writing-abili...ue/reader/

This one is very nice, thank you!

I'm not sure why this concept is so hard to understand.

Japanese people change how much kanji they use depending on what they are writing or who they are writing to. The amount of kanji in a document will change the feel from being friendly to being a serious/formal document. If you write your friend, you'll be using a lot of hiragana instead of kanji, but if you write a paper for school/a news article/academic paper, you'll be using kanji where ever you can.

This is no different from English where you use lots of 'simple' words when you write in non-formal situations but switch over to longer words that mean almost the same thing; when you need to write an essay for class.

vix86 Wrote:I'm not sure why this concept is so hard to understand.

Japanese people change how much kanji they use depending on what they are writing or who they are writing to. The amount of kanji in a document will change the feel from being friendly to being a serious/formal document. If you write your friend, you'll be using a lot of hiragana instead of kanji, but if you write a paper for school/a news article/academic paper, you'll be using kanji where ever you can.

This is no different from English where you use lots of 'simple' words when you write in non-formal situations but switch over to longer words that mean almost the same thing; when you need to write an essay for class.

I don't think it's the same as English at all. I think your analogy is wrong. In Japanese if you choose to write a word whether hard/obscure or "easy" in kana vs. kanji it's still the same word. It's still spoken out loud the same as if you wrote it in kanji. In English the "hard" words are completely different from the "simple" words.

The mystery is why some Japanese people for example would routinely write 靴 for shoe and others would choose to write くつ. But in both cases you say "kutsu" out loud. There is no analogy with English.

Most native speakers would probably write くつ in kanji if they were typing, in handwriting if they forget how to write the kanji they may go with kana instead. I don't think that generally native speakers use more or less kanji to somehow control how a piece of writing looks; most of the time their choice is based more on writing standards. 此れ is a fairly easy kanji to write, but almost nobody uses it nowadays. On the other hand, 憂鬱 is typically written in kanji (presuming we're talking about typing, not handwriting).

vix86 Wrote:This is no different from English where you use lots of 'simple' words when you write in non-formal situations but switch over to longer words that mean almost the same thing; when you need to write an essay for class.

vix86, I for one understand the parallel to English. “Perceive” comes from English's more hifalutin Latin roots while ”see” comes from its more down-to-earth Germanic roots: same ‘word’ but different form based on the social register one wishes to occupy.

I also appreciate that while in the modern Anglosphere the spoken and written languages are one and the same, throughout most of history and even today in most parts of the world, the language(s) spoken by a literate person may be entirely different from the language(s) written by him or her. Thus I found your explanation cogent and insightful.

Is this reference too dated?