Japanese Spacing In Between Words?

[Natahlia]

I have noticed that unlike westerners, the Japanese do not put space between words of a sentence. I can still read it, but I wonder if that can be played with a little?
In lyrics videos there is spacing sometimes.
Wouldn't it be much easier if there was spacing? Hm....
Or do they do both? spacing and non spacing?

[Aggitan]

After a while I came to the conclusion that spacing in Japanese is done away with and done by kanji (That stuff that keeps people up at night or wakes them up screaming in a cold sweat....).

The more kanji that is in a sentence the easier it is to discern between words.

I'm probably wrong but still wanted to throw that out there.

[Max]

if there are alot of kanji in a sentence it's harder to discern between words, unless you know the words you write with that kanji. It's more likely that you will think that a "4-kanji-vocabulary" are 2 words.
more on the topic, they don't use spaces, however, you can see it sometimes if it gets too messy to read.

[Aggitan]

I suppose you're right. The only example of this from my limited vocabulary is kyou今日 it means "today" but the individual kanji are now-ima今 and day-hi日 "now day" so If you have a string of words like those then it'd probably be hard to peel words apart.

¯\(°-°)/¯

[Terry S.]

That is the biggest hurdle I am having with learning Japanese. I can recognize Hiragana and Katakana, but without any kind of spaces, I have NO idea what I am reading, or where one word ends, and the next begins. I'm sure that as I learn more, I'll be able to figure it out, but it's definitely challenging.

[妖怪エミリちゃん]

I've found that when you start to learn Japanese the spacing makes everything really easy to read, but most texts will not have the spaces -.- If you look for particles in the sentences it gets a bit easier to read, i.e を, は, と, and が. Other than that some kanji helps, esp in verbs when you can see the kanji + hiragana that makes up a word (思う、見る etc) but when you don't know the kanji everything gets confusing >< Anyone else have any tips that can help?

[Max]

i don't have any tips for knowing kanjis you don't know... learn them :P
as for spacing it's better to get rid of the habit to use spaces as soon as possible, or it will get really hard later on. It actually takes more time for me to read a japanese sentence with spaces now.

[妖怪エミリちゃん]

ah thanks. I hope my Japanese skills will advance like yours :)