if your grammar is good, you can space everything out in your mind no problem at all... I like to play a lot of old RPGs in Japanese on the NES and SNES. They are mostly in kana of course. As long as you got a dictionary, it's a piece of cake to read.

Kyoshi88 Wrote:I agree, kana only texts are really difficult to read and understand. Not only can the same 'word' actually be more than a dozen words, kanji also serve as spacing and makes me tumble over. Also, knowing just the kanji meanings can be enough to understand (most of) the sentence, kana forces you to know the kanji reading that is substituded as well. Most common words have common ways to write them, if 幸せ　is suddenly written as シアワセ, I'd tumble over and have no idea what is meant, and I'll check the text before what kanji it could be, check the text again if the katakana was meant to emphasize something (katakana is sometimes used that way) and end up being busy for 2 or 3 seconds, while the kanji form will be interpreted instantly.

what I've learned from experience is: for kana words that are usual written in kanji, it's best to learn the kanji equivalent and you will eventually be able to recognize their kana equivalents(you just need to get more used to jp). I know katakana is used for emphasis a lot but there is a good portion of stuff written only in kana. Then again, it really comes down to learning more and more

There's a new shared Anki deck called "Japanese Children's Story ちいさなおひっこし with Audio", with text from a book by Komine Yura. Even though the vocabulary is elementary, I find it somewhat harder to read than text with kanji. Perhaps I use kanji as a crutch.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Komine Yura, here's a link:
http://www1.atpages.jp/yurara/

yeah this happens to me with even real books for adults etc. it's like if they wrote whtaever word in kanji then i wouldn't have gotten confused. Because of the particle は　・　に・で etc etc. if you write the word in hirgana vs. kanji then it might form a new word and you'll be like what that doesn't make sense. It just creates unnecessary ambiguity.

one example that I remember because I asked on chiebukuro.
It was
あの人は心がわりをするような人じゃない.

and from what I read I i initially thought it meant
心が　わりをする
so i tried to look up wari wo suru and I got nothing so I asked on chiebukuro.

then the person said who responded said NO you're reading wrong it's
心がわり　を　する. I know what that means it's just from the way I read it, I just assumed the ga was the particle, not part of the word. Of course it hit me in the head, why didn't i realize that but... it happens . It was another instance of being irritated at the fact that book isn't written with as much as kanji as possible.

Even if it doesn't create this problem, just in general, things are just understand faster with the kanji as opposed to not so I wish they would write books with anything that could be written in kanji, written in kanji unless it's never commonly written in kanji to the point that probably no one can read it.