fugu68
Member
From: Tokyo
Registered: 2005-11-30
Posts: 115
I came across the word ダブる(= to be duplicated, repeat a year at school), which struck me as slightly odd, as it mixes katakana and hiragana within the same word.
I checked with my native speaker informant, and she immediately gave me that spelling, as does my electronic version of the Green Goddess.
So how common is this within-word kana mixing, and can you think of any other examples?
The only other one I found was トラブる (=make trouble), which is same sort of thing - foreign loanword plus -る suffix to turn it into a verb.
magamo
Member
From: Pasadena, CA
Registered: 2009-05-29
Posts: 1039
You can also use katakana for the roots of certain verbs to use them for particular meanings, e.g., もうヤッた? (やる as "get laid").
There are multi-alphabet nouns too. For example, テレビっ子 is a child who spends a lot of time watching TV like a couch potato. As you can see, it has katakana (テレビ), hiragana (っ), and kanji (子).