I don’t know if this has been suggested (or possibly already done) before, but what does everyone think of having an app that let’s the user know if a certain kanji is usually written in Hiragana or not?
I know there it’s not completely useless to learn the kanji for some of these kinds of words, since using kanji for them isn’t “wrong” and they might occasionally show up in more formal writing. I also know there are some words that typically use kanji but can be written in Hiragana for stylistic reasons or something similar to that. I just thought it might be really nice to be able to skip the “should this word be written in kana” Jisho search, so if someone happens to be kind enough to spend some time making it, that would be really awesome. 
Again, I’d like to hear thoughts; would something like this be too much work for too little convenience? Or is it maybe just a dumb idea from a linguistic standpoint?
I would really appreciate a feature like this too! Shouldn’t be too hard to add as a tag, maybe in the “Part of Speech” section.
I believe the main reason we learn “vocabulary” here is to help to fixate the kanji into our memory as well as to learn different readings. For that purpose, skipping words usually written in hiragana is counter productive. We are not really learning these words for the sake of learning vocabulary. We are learning them for the sake of learning kanji. That is why this site teaches even some uncommon words, it is mostly so we learn kanji better. Ideally, you are learning vocabulary from some other source, and there is where you will learn which words are usually written in hiragana.
That said, it would be nice if there was some indication of words that are usually written in hiragana. Say, in the lesson or in the word page.
Often, whether a word is written in kanji or kana depends on which definition is intended. Without adding a detailed dictionary entry, the best they could do in such cases would be to just let you know that some uses of a word are written in kana only. Maybe that would be good enough, though.
Heatth said... I believe the main reason we learn "vocabulary" here is to help to fixate the kanji into our memory as well as to learn different readings. For that purpose, skipping words usually written in hiragana is counter productive. We are not really learning these words for the sake of learning vocabulary. We are learning them for the sake of learning kanji. That is why this site teaches even some uncommon words, it is mostly so we learn kanji better. Ideally, you are learning vocabulary from some other source, and there is where you will learn which words are usually written in hiragana.That's a good point. WK definitely does have some words that you might never use in Japanese (食中毒 comes to mind), and the main purpose is to help solidify the reading/meaning of the kanji. I agree on your point to keep those words as vocabulary. Like you said though, it would be nice to have some indication, hahah.
That said, it would be nice if there was some indication of words that are usually written in hiragana. Say, in the lesson or in the word page.
rfindley said... Often, whether a word is written in kanji or kana depends on which definition is intended. Without adding a detailed dictionary entry, the best they could do in such cases would be to just let you know that some uses of a word are written in kana only. Maybe that would be good enough, though.I think that would be perfect, yeah. Still, there are some words that you'll almost never see in kanji, right? Things like だけ or とりわけ, for example.
I agree I have almost never seen たくさん written as 沢山。or ほと written as 程。 but I understand it’s important to learn the kanji and how it helps the learning process.