Thora Wrote:The kanjijiten site　has わたし as one of the readings added in 2010.

I've also been using the Green Goddess as a guideline for unfamiliar words, but I'm finding it doesn't always reflect common usage.

Incidentally, I noticed there's some overzealous 'kanjification' in some of the various vocab lists floated around (core, jlpt, etc.) No harm in learning rare kanji I suppose, but some words just aren't ever written in kanji.

I haven't noticed to much overzealous kanjification in the core vocab sentences. I seems to reflect what I see in games pretty well anyway. Although I've been playing Final Fantasy 7 in Japanese lately, and noticed that there seems to be a noticeable lack of Kanji when compared to other more current RPGs. I thought that was a little interesting. I'm not sure if there's a reason for it or not.

I'm not sure how accurate Kanji usage is in games (specifically JRPGs) though. That's where I see most of my written Japanese.

Thora Wrote:Incidentally, I noticed there's some overzealous 'kanjification' in some of the various vocab lists floated around (core, jlpt, etc.) No harm in learning rare kanji I suppose, but some words just aren't ever written in kanji.

Yeah, i like that though. Partly because it means i can read it in kanji for the rare case where the kanji is used, but more importantly because the kanji give me a hook that really helps me learn the word. Trying to drill from kana to meaning for words that are brand new to me is just painful. Once i've learned them, i can generally recognise them in either form.

No one has mentioned this, but an overuse of kanji makes sentences/papers/documents sound more formal and business like. If you want a good example, look at posts on 2ch and then try browsing a Japanese college website. 2ch has a lot of kana while college website is a wall of kanji usually.