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Let me start by saying the site is really great and besides good information you find very nice and helpful people

But a constructive criticism , which I'm not even sure if it's possible to apply, for those of us who are in the process of learning kanjis, having the answers with the japanese words written in just kanjis sometimes, it makes sometimes and for some people the answers difficult to understand. If under the kanjis there would be a romaji version of the japanese words that would be really great, of course, the answers would take more time to be written.

Greetings

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    I am willing to add furigana, but... ローマ字はちょっとね・・ ^^;
    – Chocolate Mod
    Aug 12, 2016 at 2:15
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    You might want to check out rikaichan/rikaikun which is a browser add-on for firefox/chrome which displays the readings when you do a mouseover.
    – Flaw Mod
    Aug 12, 2016 at 4:04
  • Back when I wasn't using Rikaichan, I used to paste text into WWWJDIC's text glosser when I needed to find out the reading / meaning of a word.
    – oals
    Aug 12, 2016 at 10:22
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    But overall, I'd prefer if furigana was used sparingly. If the question is at all of an advanced variety (中級レベルぐらい) I'd expect that furigana was omitted on the most common 300 or so kanji, unless it is an uncommon reading. Also, if the word is repeated, only the first instance should have furigana. (example)
    – oals
    Aug 12, 2016 at 10:31
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    Related: meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1486/…
    – oals
    Aug 12, 2016 at 10:32

1 Answer 1

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Though I'm aware that the orthography isn't a simple matter in Japanese, and I try to be careful not to be cryptic as possible, I know I'm just failing to be perfect for many times.

But please understand that for me — and probably anyone who has spent most of the lifetime in Japan, controlling the use of kanji is somewhat close to choosing words only from Basic English's word list (to which I've already been noncompliant from the first sentence by using "aware" and "matter"). Moreover, I can't help but finding that dictionaries and resources that are easily available to SL learners occasionally have some points a little out of sync from native speakers' "standard", which makes it difficult for us to predict what's generally easy or advanced to learners.

Anyway, you can feel free to ask them for phonetic aid if the orthography is bugging you (regardless of whether you're the questioner or not), and I'm happy to make revision whenever I get comments.

As for romaji, don't put too much expect on this in Japanese learning. In current state, it's no more than imitation of real writing both de jure and de facto, as it doesn't even have an agreed orthography (two major schools, tons of minor variations...). It's very much recommended that you learn hiragana and katakana at the starting point.

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  • In StackOverflow they are making a documentation project, which gives points to the users who contributes to the documentation, the documentation aims in part to document the examples given in the boards as far as I understand. If you could start something like that here, with the answers not only written in Kanjis but in Hiragana instead of Romaji if you like, that would be really awesome
    – Pablo
    Aug 12, 2016 at 18:00
  • @Pablo I've heard of SO Documentation, but not sure how it's working yet. Do you mean it's going to provide programming documentation in Japanese, or explain Japanese? Aug 12, 2016 at 18:09
  • No, I meant to take that as example and document the answers to japanese language questions here, my commentary had no relation with programming in japanese. I'm not sure how japanese stackexchange relates to SO but since you are using the same software I guess moderators here have some sort of contact with the SO creators
    – Pablo
    Aug 12, 2016 at 18:12

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