Is 「今朝」 or 「今日の朝」 more natural?


I've come across several forums online detailing that 「今朝」 sounds either very
formal or old-fashioned in that it is not used too often nowadays. However, it
is also the one I see most commonly used in newspaper articles and the such.

Meanwhile, in the case of 「今日の朝」 or 「今日朝」, it more directly reflects the other
structures we use in Japanese class, such as 「土曜日の朝」 and 「今夜」.

So, which of the two (or three, if you include 「今日朝」) sounds more natural in
everyday speech?




I think in spoken language 今朝 is perfectly acceptable and certainly not less
natural than 今日の朝. 今日の朝 may be more colloquial than 今朝, but saying that 今朝 is
"very formal" or "old-fashioned" seems to be taking it too far.

It might be a little far-fetched, but I think this is also reflected in corpus
data such as 少納言. Even though it is a corpus of _written_ Japanese, it does
contain data from two online sites, namely Yahoo!知恵袋 and Yahoo!ブログ, where
people are more likely to write as they speak.

Indeed, 50 out of 60 instances of `今日の朝` come from Yahoo!知恵袋 or Yahoo!ブログ. The
remaining 10 instances come from books, at least 5 of which are direct speech!

**今日の朝**

[code]

      50 online forum / blogs
       5 books (prose) (?)
       5 books (direct speech)
    
[/code]

(I disregarded false positives such as 今日の朝日新聞, etc.)

As is to be expected from a corpus about written language, these are heavily
outweighed by instances of 今朝:

**今朝**

[code]

    1767 online forum / blogs
     832 books
    
[/code]

However, these numbers seem to suggest that 今日の朝 is more colloquial than 今朝,
since books only use 今日の朝 0.6% of the time (in prose), whereas on online forum
/ blogs 2.8% of the time.

