Or all Japanese, even. Or all one word—Google is quite happy to split Japanese text across punctuation if you don't wrap it in quotation marks.

I would recommend not trusting edict; while I'm not sure I would call it wrong, I would not call the classification "usual" strong enough to be useful.

~J

pm215 Wrote:You could do worse than checking google hit counts:
やさしい 27,000,000
易しい 889,000

Just a note: make sure you put the search term into quotes.
Google will happily match なぜですか when you've searched for 何故ですか.

pm215 Wrote:You could do worse than checking google hit counts

Unfortunately, Google hit counts are sketchy at best for that sort of thing... we take it for granted that if Google says there are X results, then there are X results, but it often just isn't the case.

- Kef

furrykef Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:You could do worse than checking google hit counts

Unfortunately, Google hit counts are sketchy at best for that sort of thing... we take it for granted that if Google says there are X results, then there are X results, but it often just isn't the case.

- Kef

Those papers on web corpora were quite the interesting read!

Incidentally, I just got bit hard by a kanji versus kana issue today. This iKnow sentence:

彼の日本語のレベルは私と同じ位だ。

A friend and I had trouble understanding 位's role in the sentence because for some reason I thought it was a noun meaning "grade, rank". It turns out that, in this sentence, it's really just a suffix meaning "approximately", which makes sense because the sentence is translated as "His Japanese level is about the same as mine." I had noticed I didn't see anything meaning "about" in there, but I didn't realize it was lurking in the 位.

I'm adding this sentence to my SRS, but I'm definitely changing 位 to くらい.

- Kef

furrykef Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:You could do worse than checking google hit counts

Unfortunately, Google hit counts are sketchy at best for that sort of thing...

Yeah, I know. (LanguageLog did a series of posts on the subject ages back.) But I generally reckon that they're good enough to distinguish "common" from "not common but still clearly used" from "very rare or perhaps an error", which is all I really wanted to do here.

furrykef Wrote:I'm adding this sentence to my SRS, but I'm definitely changing 位 to くらい.

I would advise against that. I encounter it kanjified with that meaning all the time.

~J

Mm... OK, kanji with a note that it's usually kana.

I'd say it's not always a good thing to use google as an indicator of the use. We have to realise that the Japanese use their IME just like we do. It's easy for them to select kanji rather than hiragana which they would do in handwritten language, or more stylistically controlled stuff.

It's something you learn with experience though. I've also found out that Edict isn't always that accurate. I've had it see not mentioning a word is usually written in Kanji while it is.

Still often I wonder if there's like some 'official' ruling on when to use kanji/kana or maybe just a guideline. Doing sentences gives you a sense for it, but apparently not enough, I find khatzumoto's spelling absolutely appalling.

So, does anyone know if there's some guide on spelling?

It always surprises me how free Japanese is in spelling. Different writers have such different usages, I like it though. Very different from my native language Dutch, where the rules are rather complicated, and also indisputable.

Spelling? Do you have an example of what you mean?

~J

I'm taking spelling in the meaning of 'how to write words' not so much how to write the sound of the words. Although I've been told there's still people around who write いる as ゐる I've never seen that in my life. But for example いる can be quite freely written as 居る and some people do, but most people avoid it. But it's sort of free, there's no 'correct' form. Just stylistically more and less pleasing. I'd call that free spelling.

Oh, that. Yeah, that's a weakness I've found with him, but it's not precisely a "weakness" in the method; he explicitly said he went out of his way to over-kanjify things, IIRC. Why he decided that on this particular issue he knew better than the native speakers, I don't know.

~J

Quick question about a couple of definitions from Yahoo!辞書:

もく‐よく【×沐浴】
［名］(スル)
１ 髪やからだを洗うこと。また、湯や水を浴びてからだを清めること。ゆあみ。

り‐かい【理解】
［名］(スル)
１ 物事の道理や筋道が正しくわかること。意味・内容をのみこむこと。

Why are からだ and わかる in hiragana and not kanji?

No way to know without asking the person who wrote it. わかる is often in kanji, I think partly because of confusion over which kanji to use. からだ is another one of those words that is just sometimes written in kana instead of kanji.