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- Indigenous words for which there are no kanji or it has become obsolete (e.g. pinpin ぴんぴん lively)
- Words for which kanji is not known to the writer or unlikely to be recognised by the readers. ‘Furigana’, as we mentioned before, is the use of (sometimes illegibly small) hiragana to give the pronunciation of kanji
- Particles, these are like the glue that binds Japanese together and are a vital part to Japanese grammar (e.g. ‘ni’ に)
- Suffixes (e.g. ~san さん)
- To change the interpretation of a kanji; many have a main meaning and a cluster of related interpretations depending on the context or accompanying hiragana. A lot of kanji also have different possible pronunciations; the relevant hiragana is used to help determine which one to use.
- Verb and adjective inflections, (e.g. a-imashita (The verb base ‘a’ is kanji and the ending ‘imashita’ in hiragana), such word endings are known as ‘okurigana’ in Japanese.
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