Userscript to replace hiragana in sample sentences with known kanji?

Hi everyone,

First post here, so sorry if I ask something that is already well known, but I cannot figure out how to concisely formulate my question to search for it :slight_smile: Effectively, when I’m doing my vocabulary lessons, I do my best to read the sentences WaniKani is suggesting, but I frequently find myself in one of two scenarios:

  • Sentence uses a lot of kanji I didn’t learn yet. I can live with this, I would just look up some of them that seem most frequently used, and ignore some other ones.
  • Sentence uses hiragana for kanji I already have learned in previous lessons. It’s not the end of the world, but I think it could’ve been better if it would actually use that kanji rather than be in hiragana, since this would give me more opportunities to practice.

The last one is the one I wonder about. Eg, うちの学こうでは、毎月テストがあります。(There is a test at my school every month). I’m pretty sure うち stands for 内, which I’ve learnt on level 3 (this sentence shows up in level 5). Am I perhaps wrong? I can dig for other examples, it happens quite a bit.

So I was wondering, maybe there exists some userscript that replaces hiragana with kanji that belong to previous levels? I’m not sure it’s very likely since that would mean that somebody would have to have manually done this for all sentences, but I figured I’d ask just in case.

That’s not really possible to make. How would you know which kanji to use?

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Someone would have to manually do it.

Yes, it’s probably 内, but this うち is usually written in kana.

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I might be mistaken, but I believe they only use kana in the example sentences in places where kana would be normal to use—not as a temporary crutch. (This sometimes means using kana for words where we also learn kanji spellings on WK.)

In the same sentence they have 学校 spelled 学こう, which is only being done that way because 校 gets taught later. This is how children who are still learning kanji (and the teachers who are teaching them) write, but we do get complaints about how difficult it can be for non-native beginners.

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Oh yeah, fair enough with that one. Admittedly I am pretty spotty in reading the example sentences closely, so I was going on my vague impressions. (And now at level 39 I’m not likely to be seeing things like this anyway.)

Thanks, that’s a really good point. I don’t know yet in which cases people would prefer just to write it in hiragana (outside of the not being taught that kanji before, like you mentioned below). I was going off the assumption that whatever can be written in kanji, will be kanji (and if need to, there is always furigana). It looks like this is not the case.

Trying to formulate a tangent question then - are there a lot of words for which technically there is kanji but people generally prefer to write them in kana?

Yes, lots. At the end of the sentence you linked, there is ある. This can be 在る (to exist) or 有る (to have). But you will very rarely see it written that way. The kosoado words (この, それ, あそこ, どちら, etc.) can all be written using kanji. That’s just scraping the surface of the topic.

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If you use jisho.org, pay attention to the usage hints after the translations. Many will have ‘usu. in kana’ or something, written in tiny font behind it. Sometimes it can be a secondary meaning that gets written in kana, or just convention.

But people kind of do their own thing with it, too. Like writers may choose to write some word in kana or kanji against convention for effect. In the book I’m reading sometimes I’ve noticed in consecutive sentences the same word is in kana in one, kanji the next.

Slang usage often gets katakanized, as well.

I have a friend who types どこ in kanji. Not sure if she would ever handwrite it like that, though.

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I do use jisho, just never happened to notice that - thank you, that helps a lot!

Also the writing reference is awesome. My brain immediately clicked with it because as I’m trying to write myself, I often do similar things (though not in Japanese), so now it all makes perfect logical sense. People just are people and do what they want - got it :smiley:

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