ydtt Wrote:(EDIT: And by this I don't mean any arbitrary sentence in hiragana, I mean an actual text in all hiragana from something made by Japanese people for Japanese people.)

Meaning children's material? or that hiragana needs context? I'm not sure the source makes a difference: it's the same issue whether it's material for children, all-hiragana texts for learners or even audio.

Aijin Wrote:As your oral comprehension increases you'll recognize the words when written purely through phonetics.

Did you mean that it'll be easer to read hiragana b/c the phonetic-meaning association will be stronger? Or that we read kanji purely through phonetics?
If the latter, and ydtt declared that "right"....well, I might have to go and find Nest0r. ;-)

@JimmyS - will you give us the answer?

I assume Aijin meant that the stronger your oral comprehension is, the easier it is to read things written purely in phonetic script (romaji, kana, etc.)

What I meant was that anyone can create a sentence in hiragana that's purposely designed to be difficult to read, and if you have difficulty reading that, it doesn't mean anything. I guess I shouldn't have excluded stuff made for learners either.

hereticalrants Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:だれ>誰 (apparently this kanji isn't common, but it's used pretty commonly, i've heard it so many times)

How do you hear a kanji?
How is something both uncommon and used commonly?
Where can I get Japanese books for around the same price I pay for English books (about 10¢ each)?

bought them off of this site, http://www.sasugabooks.com/index.php
it was a sale, so books ranged from 2$-20$

hereticalrants Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:だれ>誰 (apparently this kanji isn't common, but it's used pretty commonly, i've heard it so many times)

How do you hear a kanji?
How is something both uncommon and used commonly?
Where can I get Japanese books for around the same price I pay for English books (about 10¢ each)?

I've actually seen that very kanji in RTK-3 but it's used commonly in anime,drama's,etc. But maybe b/c it's a rough word to say.

ta12121 Wrote:

hereticalrants Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:だれ>誰 (apparently this kanji isn't common, but it's used pretty commonly, i've heard it so many times)

How do you hear a kanji?
How is something both uncommon and used commonly?
Where can I get Japanese books for around the same price I pay for English books (about 10¢ each)?

I've actually seen that very kanji in RTK-3 but it's used commonly in anime,drama's,etc. But maybe b/c it's a rough word to say.

It's a very common kanji, it's being added to the Jouyou this year.

ydtt - I see, thanks. (I'm learning to check first what the intended meaning was.) :-)

I have a somewhat related Q. Is there a good way to check whether words are typically kanji or kana? I had been using the big Kenkyusha eg sentences, but discovered it isn't reliable for that. Daijirin occasionally mentions something (eg kana when used as adverb), but not consistently. Can we trust EDICT's uk markings? I sometimes google examples, but that's time consuming and isn't possible with some words.

Well, I need to learn to write more clearly on my first post.