Hey all, just a quick beginners question.

I was looking up 首 on yahoo, and as i normally do- i try to look up and find an interesting example sentence so that I can see it in context. This was one of them-

首をかしげる
lean one's head to the side／tilt one's head

On my Rikaichan dictionary however it says that かしげる is 傾げる (with the kanji for "lean" on rtk used).

My question is, why is it presented here in hiragana? Does that mean that this action is normally expressed in hiragana? or should I learn its kanji form? I know that some verbs are normally written in hiragana only and wanted to clear things up.

Thanks.

I don't know much about this verb, but you could try google the phrases "首を傾げる" and "首をかしげる" to see which one gets more results. ("首を傾げる" won, so it's probably more commonly written this way.) Maybe yahoo wrote the verb in hiragana because 傾げる could be read two different ways.

Maybe it's just to make it easier to read? Maybe not everyone reads texts that use 傾げる with kanji(I imagine it would appear primarily in novels, that's my experience). 傾げる can only be read one way. I bet the dictionary is more concerned with people being able to read the definitions than showing off how many kanji it can use.

Although 傾 is on the Jouyou list, the reading かしげる is not -- this could account for the dictionary not using it; you may see it more on the web because all you have to do is hit the space bar for it to come up. (The only "approved" kun-yomi of 傾　is かたむく)

I see this all the time. I've seen むかしばなし, 昔ばなし and むかし話 all in the same book. I've seen おまえ and お前 in the same manga. I've seen いう and 言う in the same article (with the same meaning). And so on. I've found inconsistencies even occuring on the same page right next to each other.

As you probably know kana is more common in some cases. E.g., common words like ここ（此処）, ある（有る）, etc.; という to "quote" something rather than to indicate speech; いく・くる used after a -te verb. Apart from that though, inconsistencies occur and I haven't found any discernible pattern.

Which is really annoying when you're trying to search a text or a corpus for a particular word.

yeah it is a bit annoying, keeps coming up personally and i've mostly just been learning the kanji forms as well.

btw does anybody use the yahoo dictionary for their look-ups? on their definitions, there are some symbols which puzzle me....and might relate to my problem

For instance, with におい (a smell/fragrance):
http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8...=0&dtype=3

at the top of the definition they have the kanji-readings in square brackets 匂い is listed as one reading but there's a cross next to it? does this mean that this character is never used? noticed that none of the example sentences use the kanji.

also, there are those up and down arrows which i have no clue as to what they indicate.........can anybody shed some light on this?

johnlugh Wrote:For instance, with におい (a smell/fragrance):
http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8...=0&dtype=3

at the top of the definition they have the kanji-readings in square brackets 匂い is listed as one reading but there's a cross next to it? does this mean that this character is never used? noticed that none of the example sentences use the kanji.

also, there are those up and down arrows which i have no clue as to what they indicate.........can anybody shed some light on this?

匂い is used all the time. I thought the x meant the kanji was rarely if ever used, as well, but looking at the reference guide, x means it is non-jouyou. ▲ means it is a jouyou kanji with a reading different from regular usage. Not sure what the down arrow means.

The symbol usage key for that dictionary says ▼ indicates a usage note (as you see from the におい entry they're not very useful since they're telling you things you already know about English word usage).

ah cool i see it now, thanks for the replies.