You guys can try to justify it any way you want, but romaji is not Japanese. It's a crutch. It was used in those old textbooks because they thought foreigners were too stupid to be able to learn kana. You can try to rationalize that any way you want, but it's true.

Hiragana is only a few dozen characters. You can learn it in a weekend. It takes another few weeks to become proficient at reading it, but it's not terrible. It's not like learning kanji at all. You can easily master kana before you begin most of the real work of Japanese.

If you find yourself not able to read even kana fast enough to parse subtitles with furigana then you have your work cut out for you. You need to read more Japanese.

I don't believe in babying people or lying to them about what's required. I think yudanitaiteki's point is mostly fine, but I just keep wondering, "what for?" Kana is an integral part of Japanese that can be learned quite quickly. It's reinforced a lot in early study even because of the paucity of kanji in most beginner texts.

This whole thing about old textbooks having more complicated grammar is pretty hilarious considering that textbooks aren't very useful past beginner level. Past beginner level, they're useful in terms of keeping everybody on the same material for a class setting, but not really efficient at teaching vocabulary or sentence patterns. So the idea of seeking out old textbooks seems insane to me. Modern Japanese resources, especially the ones developed here, are so much better, and they actually respect the learner.

If you find yourself asking the question, "Can I find romaji subs?" then you need to work on reading kana. It's that simple. I wish there were an easier route, but there is no easier route than spending a couple weeks reading kana to get used to it. I know this forum likes to help people, and also help people find easier paths towards proficiency. In this instance, however, it's not really warranted.

The answer here is clearly, "work a little bit harder." If you can't bother to spend literally a couple of weeks learning to read kana smoothly then Japanese isn't for you, and you probably won't be able to put up with the many months it takes after that to be able to really learn the language.

I applaud everybody for trying to be nice, but at a certain point I think 'tough love' is the only answer.

john555 Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:Kana doesn't help you pronounce Japanese any better than romaji does; if anything it harms your pronunciation because people think that if they learned the kana (from a table that gives the romaji for each kana), they know how to pronounce Japanese.

Limited use of romaji for acquiring early oral skill is fine. I did this when I started learning Japanese (I didn't even learn kana until I had been studying Japanese for 6 months). It didn't have any long-term effect on my Japanese ability.

Thank you! This is what my position has always been. Using kana won't make you pronounce Japanese any "better" than using romaji. I mean, "ma" is "ma" whether written in romaji or kana.

Most of my textbooks use romaji and I have neither the time nor desire to re-write the romaji parts in kana anyway.

I find I've gravitated to older textbooks (which use romaji) because the grammar is more challenging and the material more adult and "grown up" than newer textbooks. In general I've found there's been a gradual "dumbing down" of the material (not just in Japanese either).

That's an entirely different debate, and pretty off-topic.

OP wants to use romaji subtitles as visual clues to help him understand the audio. Which makes sense. People here were arguing that kana and even kanji subtitles would serve a similar purpose, all the while being easier to come by.

erlog Wrote:You guys can try to justify it any way you want, but romaji is not Japanese. It's a crutch. It was used in those old textbooks because they thought foreigners were too stupid to be able to learn kana. You can try to rationalize that any way you want, but it's true.

That's a ridiculous statement. My excellent Japanese reader, "An Introduction to Written Japanese" (English Universities Press, 1963) has each reading passage in three forms: kanji/kana, romaji transcription, and English translation. The grammatical footnotes are all in romaji. The last four reading passages (there are twenty in total) show the student older forms of kanji previously introduced and introduce alternate, outdated kana combinations in case the student later comes across them in reading pre-WWII materials. In fact, the book goes beyond what most textbooks do in giving examples of kana combinations that the government decided to abolish after WWII. This book is definitely not "Japanese for Dummies."

All in all, a sophisticated, intellectually challenging textbook that has romaji transcriptions. The authors, Dunn and Yanada were (I assume "were" at this date) professors of Japanese at the University of London. I like the book because they treat the student like an adult in their grammatical discussions; there's no dumbing down here.

I can without hesitation recommend this book to those on this forum at this stage in their learning. It's a graded reader in that the reading selections become more and more difficult as one progresses. I'm working on reading passage number 14. The sentences are long and grammatically intricate; I enjoy being challenged this way. I'm working through the book using the romaji transcriptions and then I'm going to go back and re-do the book using the kana/kanji versions of the readings.

erlog Wrote:romaji sucks

I would take it a step further and say just learn Japanese how it's actually written. There's no reason to use romaji, and there's no reason to use kana-only. If you find yourself asking for kana-only subs, that's also not good enough. Learn to read it with kanji.

john555 Wrote:I'm working through the book using the romaji transcriptions and then I'm going to go back and re-do the book using the kana/kanji versions of the readings.

So you're basically just going to have to relearn everything again. Why not just start with kanji? Anything else is just a waste of time.

kameden Wrote:

john555 Wrote:I'm working through the book using the romaji transcriptions and then I'm going to go back and re-do the book using the kana/kanji versions of the readings.

So you're basically just going to have to relearn everything again. Why not just start with kanji? Anything else is just a waste of time.

I'm not "re-learning everything again". I'm taking the divide and conquer approach used in RTK1 i.e., do one thing at a time.

I already worked through RTK1 so I already know the keyword that goes with each of the 2,000 kanji. What I found when I tried to go through the book using the kana/kanji sections first, I knew the keywords for each kanji but usually I didn't know how to pronounce the kanji in Japanese. In other words, I didn't know enough Japanese phonetically.

So I'm going through the whole book using romaji only to master the material phonetically. Then when I read the kanj/kana sections it will be easier because I will know already the phonetic pronunciation of the kanji.

john555 Wrote:Thank you! This is what my position has always been. Using kana won't make you pronounce Japanese any "better" than using romaji. I mean, "ma" is "ma" whether written in romaji or kana.

Actually (and I speak for myself but I doubt I'm an isolated case), because there is a perceptual difference between ま　and ma, subconsciouly you start associating ま with the Japanese sound (with the deep a), which is different from ma (which are the English and French ma for me). Sometimes when I shadow too quickly between English and Japanese, I'd pronounce English with my speaking organs in Japanese mode. And I'm convinced it's the same with your mental hear. So no, ま　isn't ma.

john555 Wrote:I'm not "re-learning everything again". I'm taking the divide and conquer approach used in RTK1 i.e., do one thing at a time.

I already worked through RTK1 so I already know the keyword that goes with each of the 2,000 kanji. What I found when I tried to go through the book using the kana/kanji sections first, I knew the keywords for each kanji but usually I didn't know how to pronounce the kanji in Japanese. In other words, I didn't know enough Japanese phonetically.

So I'm going through the whole book using romaji only to master the material phonetically. Then when I read the kanj/kana sections it will be easier because I will know already the phonetic pronunciation of the kanji.

So you're learning three things to learn one thing. RTK keywords are just as useless as reading romaji. Just learn Japanese instead of doing all of this fake shit that doesn't really help you at all.

Sorry for not reading the whole thread before posting, but you might try https://www.erin.ne.jp/en/ which is a series of short videos designed for learners. It may not be as interesting as native material but I really don't think you're going to find much if any of that prepared specifically for beginners.

P.s. It lets you choose to display any combination of kanji, kana, romaji and translation.

The purpose of limited romaji use is that it allows you to more quickly develop your oral proficiency before learning to read the language. Romanized Japanese is still Japanese, just not Japanese the way it's usually written (although most native speakers type their Japanese on computers in romaji.) I agree that the older readers that actually had long paragraphs of romaji are not particularly helpful nowadays. But I always find it a little odd to see people criticize romaji because it's "not Japanese" but then champion RTK, which isn't Japanese.

The overuse of romaji wasn't because textbook writers thought people were stupid, but because in the pre-computer/internet days it was much harder to acquire Japanese written material that was possible for beginners or even intermediate students to read. Imagine trying to learn Japanese in the US, without the Internet or a computer -- only Nelson's paper kanji dictionary (or the older Rose-Innes) and the very few readers that were available. Getting Japanese printed material of any kind would have been extremely difficult. Also most of your learners would have never seen any kind of written Japanese, so they may not have wanted to scare off beginners -- this might tend more towards the "people are stupid" area but I think you have to have some understanding of what learning Japanese would have been like in the 1950s-80s.

Quote:So I'm going through the whole book using romaji only to master the material phonetically. Then when I read the kanj/kana sections it will be easier because I will know already the phonetic pronunciation of the kanji.

This is what books like Japanese: The Spoken Language and DeFrancis' Chinese books were based on; it's still a pedagogical system that a significant minority of teachers hold to. I think that the system has become less useful with the resources that are now available on the Internet, but to me it's still a perfectly viable way of learning East Asian languages. In my experience in learning both Japanese and Chinese, having basic oral proficiency is a big help in learning to begin reading in a language with a totally unfamiliar writing system. (EDIT: I should add that these systems are based on the premise that in class, you will be doing conversation practice without any written Japanese, romaji or otherwise. You're supposed to be doing primarily oral practice, with the romaji only there for reference or grammar explanations.)

For me, kana weren't helpful at all in pronunciation. I mispronounced the "hi" (ひ) syllable for years, even years after I passed the old JLPT 1, until a professor finally corrected me about it. I didn't do the unvoiced syllables or the long/short vowels correctly either.

Anyway, that's way too long of a post for this issue -- with all the modern resources available I think it's much easier to avoid romaji for people who don't want to deal with it. But if you want to use it some, it won't cause you any long term problems if you're careful.

EratiK Wrote:

john555 Wrote:Thank you! This is what my position has always been. Using kana won't make you pronounce Japanese any "better" than using romaji. I mean, "ma" is "ma" whether written in romaji or kana.

Actually (and I speak for myself but I doubt I'm an isolated case), because there is a perceptual difference between ま　and ma, subconsciouly you start associating ま with the Japanese sound (with the deep a), which is different from ma (which are the English and French ma for me). Sometimes when I shadow too quickly between English and Japanese, I'd pronounce English with my speaking organs in Japanese mode. And I'm convinced it's the same with your mental hear. So no, ま　isn't ma.

I absolutely second this! If you use the kana then まん has one pronunciation, if you use romaji then I doubt the first thing you will hear/say is まん. I see 'man' and think 'adult male' regardless of if I am in Japanese mode or not. I had to double taking here to ensure my example was correct - まん is that far from being 'man' in my mind. But hey, one day if you stick with it you will likely reach the same conclusion about romaji and at that point you can decide if it was worth it. I can only speak from my own experience, your milage may vary.

Rusty Wrote:It is like I go to the train station and as for a ticket to Edinburgh and everyone has a ton of ideas for where I'd be much better going.

Well I apologize. I thought your intentions were to learn Japanese and specifically to improve your listening. To that end a bunch of us offered some advice, and I still stand behind Daichi's suggestion. If your intentions are rather to watch cartoons with Japanese subtitles transcribed in foreign alphabets then, you are right, you will not find much help.

The better analogy would be that you are trying to go to Edinburgh and rather than changing trains 15 times, as your itinerary says, we suggest you take one train directly there.

EDIT: I do agree with Yudantaiteki as well on the issue of romaji. He has a well thought out post which I think is a very valid counter-point. To each there own.

People arguing over romaji in the year 2014. This forum is truly a mysterious place at times.

john555 Wrote:Besides, romaji is better than kana because real Japanese isn't written all in kana anyway.

This is really just too amazing. Almost like a proof by cases gone entirely wrong.
____
Anyway to put aside my snarkiness and address the OP, you're really going to have a hard time finding a resource that provides romaji subtitles. The best most accessible form of this might be in opening/ending karaoke subtitles for fansubbed Anime; but those are most certainly almost always bundled with the video files themselves.

Sorry OP, but that's probably the most likely correct answer to your original question. Everyone has suggested plenty of alternative advice (which I agree with), so no need for me to beat a dead horse.

Flamerokz Wrote:Anyway to put aside my snarkiness and address the OP, you're really going to have a hard time finding a resource that provides romaji subtitles. The best most accessible form of this might be in opening/ending karaoke subtitles for fansubbed Anime; but those are most certainly almost always bundled with the video files themselves.

As I said in an earlier post, at least some of the videos that accompany Japanese For Busy People have romaji subtitles.

yudantaiteki Wrote:The overuse of romaji wasn't because textbook writers thought people were stupid, but because in the pre-computer/internet days it was much harder to acquire Japanese written material that was possible for beginners or even intermediate students to read.

I think the real reason romaji was more used in decades past is because of a different educational philosophy back then vs. today. Back then it was felt that you needed a solid grounding in spoken Japanese before beginning to tackle kanji/kana.

Here are three actual quotes from three different textbooks illustrating the philosophy of the time (they're all excellent books, by the way):

"The writing of Japanese is a complicated study in itself, and unless you can master spoken Japanese you will not make any headway with the written language." (Teach Yourself Japanese, 1958).

"It is unwise to undertake the study of the Japanese writing system before acquiring some fluency in the spoken language." (Essential Japanese, 1969).

"To get started in learning to read modern Japanese along the correct lines, it is essential that first of all you have some knowledge of the modern spoken language. This is so important that it is well to emphasize it strongly from the beginning--contrary to what you may think, you undoubtedly will NOT make the best progress in learning to read Japanese by starting in your study of the language directly with reading and writing in the Japanese script. Some previous work with spoken Japanese is essential, and the better your grasp of the patterns and forms of the spoken language is, the faster and surer will be your progress with the reading materials in this book." (A Japanese Reader, 1962).

The fact is that hiragana really can be mastered over the course of a few days. I did it, and all the students in my beginner level class did it when I was in college. It was probably one of the least difficult things we were asked to do in that class. Even the students that had only a casual interest in learning Japanese were able to learn to read hiragana with few difficulties.

So you're talking about optimizing toward spoken Japanese using romaji.. all so you can save a few days of work.

The authors of those older textbooks refused to admit that hiragana is so simple that foreigners really can learn it that fast. Yeah, they constructed a lot of pleasant-sounding rationalizations, but that just makes it sound more like paternalism rather than malice. No matter how you portray it, the thinking at the time was that our feeble foreign brains would just take sooo long to learn kana.

I'm not against romaji for a few weeks to help beginners get off the ground a little bit, but past that it seems really crazy to keep using it. It's not a tall order.

erlog Wrote:The authors of those older textbooks refused to admit that hiragana is so simple that foreigners really can learn it that fast. Yeah, they constructed a lot of pleasant-sounding rationalizations, but that just makes it sound more like paternalism rather than malice. No matter how you portray it, the thinking at the time was that our feeble foreign brains would just take sooo long to learn kana.

I have to disagree. Imo it's not about how easy it is to learn kana it's about an "all or nothing" model. I have a feeling romaji was developped in analogy with Chinese, with people thinking "Hm, Japanese has kanji too, no tones, a transcription with Latin alphabet will be pretty convenient". And people never thought about implementing something like "all kana" in textbooks (as opposed to "all romaji") because all kana isn't the usual way Japanese is written either, the usual way is kana+kanji, and if you don't start tackling the kanji problem in the book I can understand authors not wanting to clutter beginners. Kanji were way more scary back then, it would be interesting to know when a few kanji sections appeared in textbooks, my guess would be during the 80s.

john555 Wrote:

Flamerokz Wrote:Anyway to put aside my snarkiness and address the OP, you're really going to have a hard time finding a resource that provides romaji subtitles. The best most accessible form of this might be in opening/ending karaoke subtitles for fansubbed Anime; but those are most certainly almost always bundled with the video files themselves.

As I said in an earlier post, at least some of the videos that accompany Japanese For Busy People have romaji subtitles.

*more resources

EDIT: I just remembered, although you (OP) might already know about this:
https://www.erin.ne.jp
has romaji subtitles for the skit lesson things. Also has kanji+kana subtitles, just in case you may be interested in that as well.

EDIT2: Man I am really the worst at reading; already been posted my bad.

EratiK Wrote:I have to disagree. Imo it's not about how easy it is to learn kana it's about an "all or nothing" model. I have a feeling romaji was developped in analogy with Chinese, with people thinking "Hm, Japanese has kanji too, no tones, a transcription with Latin alphabet will be pretty convenient". And people never thought about implementing something like "all kana" in textbooks (as opposed to "all romaji") because all kana isn't the usual way Japanese is written either, the usual way is kana+kanji, and if you don't start tackling the kanji problem in the book I can understand authors not wanting to clutter beginners. Kanji were way more scary back then, it would be interesting to know when a few kanji sections appeared in textbooks, my guess would be during the 80s.

The books that use romaji like JFBP, JFE, and the various small J-E/E-J dictionaries that use romaji are probably motivated by sales. They believe (probably rightly) that they'll sell more copies of their book if they don't appeal only to a more serious, hardcore audience. I remember hearing once that at least as late as the late 90s, most publishers wouldn't accept Japanese learning books that didn't use romaji.

However, there are other books (such as Japanese: the Spoken Language) that have specific, carefully considered reasons for using romaji instead of kana. The primary reason is simply that if your intention is that the students focus primarily on oral proficiency at the beginning, there's little profit to immediately learning kana, and romaji won't do any particular harm. My experience is that most students cannot master kana in a few days; it takes a lot more practice than that to become fluent in reading them, and it goes a lot faster if you can actually read text right from the start (because you have some language basis) instead of just decoding symbols.

You're right, but I had the impression we were discussing even older textbooks, since erlog replied to a post about 60s books (and so did I)(some of which where possibly all romaji). During the 90s (JFBP, JFE) the learning and editorial contexts had changed like you pointed out, and another use of romaji was possible, integrated with kana+kanji writing.

When I finished RTK1 I tried doing something similar by not learning how to read kanji and simply doing vocab only in kana form. I thought I could learn the spoken language before the written one.

I realized I was just postponing learning how to read kanji because it's hard work. It's a lot more work to learn to read every kanji in RTK than it is to do RTK.

The problem with the "learning the spoken language first" approach is that there's just not enough material, or that the material just isn't dense enough. I've read about 25000 pages of Japanese over the last 1 1/2 years and I estimate it took about 1000 hours. I'm not anywhere near fluent. But the same amount of input in audio form would take probably twice or three times as much time.

Just not feasible to learn the spoken language before the written one, unless one plans to live in Japan for multiple years. There's just no way to replace the learning density of reading in my opinion.

edit: Also there's basically no romaji or kana only material to speak of. There are a few sources, but we are talking about 10s of thousands of pages to reach any kind of proficiency and that kind of material doesn't exist or isn't interesting enough. It needs to be interesting and engaging or that kind of time investment is just straight impossible.

The speaking first approach is tough self-study. I wouldn't recommend it outside of a class with a teacher who knows what they're doing.

(Only a very small number of people advocate long periods of speaking-only before starting reading; OSU's program is 6 weeks before the introduction of writing and I think even less would be reasonable.)

JFE has fairly minimal romaji use in all fairness.

It starts the first couple lessons with romaji, that way you can still learn other stuff while also learning the kana.

All exercises have no romaji, even from the start. Lesson 1 has romaji for the intro dialogues, grammar explanations, and vocab lists. ( in addition to japanese script )

Lesson 2 eliminates romaji from all grammar explanations.

Lesson 3 separates the dialogue in japanese script from the romaji.

Lesson 4 eliminates romaji completely from the intro dialogues.

By the end of lesson 5, out of 27 lessons, romaji is completely gone.

The expectation is that you should learn the script by then, but doesn't stop you from learning vocab and grammar while doing so.

I think it may be more reasonable to advocate a long period without kanji production (just recognition) than a long period of just speaking (or just kana or romaji).

As someone who didn't do RTK, texts with furigana (both manga and children's books) were a really big factor in giving me language exposure (and passive kanji exposure) while I still had a fairly limited amount of kanji knowledge.

Even if you do RTK and finish it fairly quickly, that still leaves so much in terms of learning the on and kun readings, learning which readings to use when -- I figure that anything that gets you exposure to the language in action, before you know enough kanji to read fluently, is a good thing.

[RawToast]

yudantaiteki Wrote:But I always find it a little odd to see people criticize romaji because it's "not Japanese" but then champion RTK, which isn't Japanese.

There's a big difference between a crutch for a 52 character syllabary and a crutch for ~1000/2100 characters.

john555 Wrote:I'm not "re-learning everything again". I'm taking the divide and conquer approach used in RTK1 i.e., do one thing at a time.

Rtk divides the task of learning the Japanese writing system into two manageable parts. That's a correct application of the divide and conquer heuristic.

I fail to see what task using romaji at first divides into manageable parts. It's not learning the language, since learning the language with romaji is actually MORE DIFFICULT (and in fact impossible) than learning the language with Kana, and it's not learning to write, since romaji doesn't help you learn how to write.

Applying divide and conquer in a sensible way, in this case, would involve dividing the task of learning to write Japanese with Kana into two parts:
1. Learn the Kana in a vacuum (with Heisig's Learning the Kana, for instance).
2. Start using the Kana you learned to study Japanese words and basic grammar.

Stansfield123 Wrote:I fail to see what task using romaji at first divides into manageable parts. It's not learning the language, since learning the language with romaji is actually MORE DIFFICULT (and in fact impossible) than learning the language with Kana

It is by no means impossible to learn Japanese with romaji -- it's not particularly useful to do so unless for some reason you are really absolutely certain that you will only ever want to speak/listen, and not read/write. So for most people there's no point.

The use of romaji in a text like Japanese: The Spoken Language is based on divide and conquer; the idea is that you should basically pass through three stages in your learning:

1 - Focus on the spoken language

2 - Start learning to read, reading only things that you already know how to say

3 - Learn new structures and vocab through reading as well as spoken practice

This is based on the way children learn their native language, and I could explain the pedagogy and reasoning in more detail but it's not really relevant to the questions in this thread since this isn't really a self-study technique.