A question for speakers/writers of Japanese and Chinese

[Mike Morgan]

Donald,

I can't speak on the question of what Chinese does (though my general
feeling is that literate adults use only Hanji), but for Japanese the answer
is that Japanese writen by literate adults is still writen with a mixture of
kanji, katakana and hiragana. Words originally from the Chinese are writen
in kanji, as are most native-Japanese noun, adjective and verb roots/stems.
Grammatical endings are written in hiragana. As for the 'minor' parts of
speech, while it is true that a word (e.g. an adverb) which is Chinese in
origin will normally be written in kanji, there are times when that same
word will be writen in hiragana, seemingly for the flow of the sentence
(ease of reading, since Japanese is writen without spaces between words, and
long stretches of kanji tend to be avoided). There are also cases where it
depends on the individual word (e.g. most postpositions are writen with
kanji, but the postpositions _kara_ 'from' and _made_ 'to, till' are
(almost?) always writen in hiragana). Numbers are written either in kanji or
in romaji ('Roman' letters, not to be confused with our Roman numerals).
There are times when a given word might well be writen in any of the three
scripts: for example, the word _kuma_ 'bear' might be writen in katakana,
the script normally reserved for foreign (European) borrowings and emphasis,
when it refers to the scientific classification _ursa_, while it would be
writen in kanji or hiragana normally (One would expect only kanji, but I
have seen it in hiragana as well and have been unable to come up with any
clue as to the rhyme or reason for the variation).

Hope this has been of some help.

Cheers!

Mike Morgan