So, I’m reading Tae Kim’s excellent guide to Japanese grammar, and it slaps me with an unfamiliar kanji. (誰)

I look it up. It’s the kanji for “who” (だれ)

I think to myself… I’ve never seen “だれ” written in kanji… why on earth is this guide using a kanji for something I’ve always seen in hiragana?

As an unscientific experiment, I google “だれ” and it comes back with one million, nine hundred thousand hits. Hah, I think to myself, obviously the hiragana is the right way to write this word and the guide is just being picky with using the kanji which obviously nobody in the real world ever uses.

I google “誰”

Two hundred million hits.

I’m flipping through a volume of “Honey and Clover” today, and I see “誰”, “誰”, “誰”, over and again.

So, yeah, I’m not as smart as I thought.