I'll start off by saying this is going to be a controversial post; one that few people will initially agree with. But I hope it will get you thinking.

I have been studying Japanese off and on for over ten years. My Japanese ability is not great, but not poor either. At risk of sounding immodest, I am a relatively intelligent person, as I believe most people here are. After all, we're spending our spare time studying languages. Who does that, right?

Recently, I looked at the lyrics for a song in both romaji and Japanese. Even though I could read the Japanese, I found out that reading the romaji helped me memorize the lyrics easier. And then I thought, perhaps because of my years growing up with Roman letters it would be best if I study also with romaji rather than abandoning it (which I did long ago). I noticed that when I think of an object, say a stereo, I automatically picture the spelling in my head. Perhaps that's just me. I wish I had such an innate grasp with math. But I don't usually picture the spelling of a Japanese word in my head, and I definitely can't picture some of the more complex kanji. I can read it on paper, but I won't see it in my head.

What do you think of all this? Do you have a similar experience or something entirely different?

If your not interested in reading at all, then go for it. However, if you plan on learning to read or take the JLPT at some point you should just suck it up and learn both kana, and kanji. The kanji will be particularly helpful with figure out what books are saying cause of the god awful amounts of homophones. If your saying you remember it faster, yea of course, you're not used to it. It's like when Japanese beginners write everything in katakana. Sure it's doable, but its not ideal, and in the end its not really the language at hand. ライク、イフアイウロートイングリシュライクディス、イットウッドビーベーリーハードツリード。

I think you bring up a good point, which is that your years of exposure to roman letters makes it preferable to read in terms of memorizing (at least for the song lyrics). For the short term, it may be useful and more efficient, but I have my doubts for the long term. Ideally, the goal is to get to where the Kanji / kana is more preferable. From my experience, you don't need equal amounts exposure of Kanji / kana to the years of roman letter exposure that you've had since you learned to read as a child, to come to this point. You just need to only associate Japanese words with their kana / kanji, and get to the point where reading is relatively fast.

I've never studied Japanese using romanji. Because of that, the times I see words spelled in romanji in this forum etc., I almost can't read them. It's such an odd and foreign feeling to try and sound out a word in romanji that I could easily spit out if it were writen in kanji.
There are also a handful of words (mainly locations in Tokyo, like shinjuku etc.) that I learned before I started studying Japanese, and therefore learned by reading romanji. Because of this, to this day I find myself defaulting sometimes to reading shinjuku on a sign that says 新宿 and shinjuku, but not for stops like 荻窪, 三鷹, etc. which is not a big deal, but a bit annoying, and I'm very thankful that is only the case for a handful of words.

Romaji and Kanji are not the only two options. In fact, Romaji, Kanji and Kana are not the only three options. There's also Furigana.

Learning the Kana and understanding the writing system enough to be able to read Furigana is a small time investment with massive benefits. While the argument can be made that skipping Kanji study, and relying on Furigana while learning the language, is a valid option, skipping Kana and not using Furigana are not.

Stansfield123 Wrote:Romaji and Kanji are not the only two options. In fact, Romaji, Kanji and Kana are not the only three options. There's also Furigana.

Learning the Kana and understanding the writing system enough to be able to read Furigana is a small time investment with massive benefits. While the argument can be made that skipping Kanji study, and relying on Furigana while learning the language, is a valid option, skipping Kana and not using Furigana are not.

Actually, I agree, but I was counting furigana as part of Kana; I probably wasn't being clear enough.

Cyborg Ninja Wrote:I'll start off by saying this is going to be a controversial post; one that few people will initially agree with. But I hope it will get you thinking.

I have been studying Japanese off and on for over ten years. My Japanese ability is not great, but not poor either. At risk of sounding immodest, I am a relatively intelligent person, as I believe most people here are. After all, we're spending our spare time studying languages. Who does that, right?

Recently, I looked at the lyrics for a song in both romaji and Japanese. Even though I could read the Japanese, I found out that reading the romaji helped me memorize the lyrics easier. And then I thought, perhaps because of my years growing up with Roman letters it would be best if I study also with romaji rather than abandoning it (which I did long ago). I noticed that when I think of an object, say a stereo, I automatically picture the spelling in my head. Perhaps that's just me. I wish I had such an innate grasp with math. But I don't usually picture the spelling of a Japanese word in my head, and I definitely can't picture some of the more complex kanji. I can read it on paper, but I won't see it in my head.

What do you think of all this? Do you have a similar experience or something entirely different?

Learning Japanese with romaji isn't controversial at all. In fact until recently it was highly recommended by experts that you should acquire a basic knowledge of spoken Japanese before attempting to learn kanji and kana, on the grounds that, as one textbook says "unless you can master spoken Japanese you will not make any headway with the written language."

This has worked for me. I'm almost finished an all romaji textbook, and I've started writing the answers to the translation exercises in kanji/kana as well as romaji. (I finished RTK1 back in March of this year). But in the initial stages it was simply too much of a distraction to use kanji/kana plus didn't add any value. For me personally, it's easier to grasp new grammatical concepts and memorize pronunciation of new vocabulary using romaji.

Reading sheet music with lyrics is a special case.
Sheet music is usually written strictly in hiragana, since different syllables might be different musical notes.
I would still prefer to read the lyrics in hiragana, since I would then be able to at least read the hiragana characters when singing Japanese karaoke.

Here is an example (it's a free sample preview of "Automatic" by Utada Hikaru from http://www.at-elise.com).

If your primary goal is conversation only, then studying vocabulary and grammar in romaji is undoubtedly the most efficient way to learn those subjects. However, if you also wish to be able to read and write in Japanese, you need a lot of practice with written Japanese. Studying vocabulary and grammar in Japanese gives you that exposure and I believe there are efficiencies in studying those skills in parallel.

You might say 6 = a half dozen, but there a skill that you get from studying Japanese written in Japanese that you don't get from studying romaji. And that is the experience of seeing words and phrases written in Japanese. I believe the current thinking about how we read in a language that we are fluent in is we do not read individual letters, but we see the shapes of the words that they form. So when you are having a hard time learning vocabulary written in Japanese, you are learning more than just vocabulary, you are learning how to read the words without thinking about it.

Also learning vocabulary using kanji makes a lot of connections with the sounds the kanji make. You might say on/kun yomi... but you don't have to study readings to notice that a lot of kanji make the same sound much of the time. It just happens when you study vocab and kanji in parallel that the kanji makes the vocab quicker to learn and the vocab makes the kanji easier to remember.

The final reason why I personally don't study using romaji is that there are not a lot of learning materials written in romaji. Sure, I suppose you could machine translate other materials to romaji provided you have a machine readable format. However, it is nice to practice reading incedental japanese text that I might see throughout the day like the text in a japanese talk show or the beer posters at the japanese restaurant, or pull a book off the shelf and just practice reading it without any ocr hassle.

If it gets you over some kind of plateau you're dealing with, go for it. But ditch it when you're over that plateau and ready to move on. (Because you DO want to read, don't you?)

I was far too interested in reading to have any patience for romaji. Frankly, it makes me itch when I see it. But if you feel like you need to use it to get better, go for it.

Method is important, but motivation is probably more important. If you can't stay motivated, or if your current method is undermining your motivation, then you won't learn anything.

So if you think this method will work for you, get on with it and have a go. If it doesn't work, or if you find you aren't getting results, or if you're feeling demotivated by it, then come back and spin the Wheel of Methods, and try another one.

EDIT: Crap, we really need a Wheel of Methods for this site... or maybe just use the Oblique Strategies, I suppose.

Cyborg Ninja Wrote:I noticed that when I think of an object, say a stereo, I automatically picture the spelling in my head. Perhaps that's just me. I wish I had such an innate grasp with math. But I don't usually picture the spelling of a Japanese word in my head, and I definitely can't picture some of the more complex kanji. I can read it on paper, but I won't see it in my head.

What do you think of all this? Do you have a similar experience or something entirely different?

It's not the same, but when I hear an unfamiliar word in English or Japanese, I tend to picture possible spellings. In Japanese this usually means kanji. As I've studied over the years, I've gotten better at it, and guess right a lot of the time, but it's taken me a while to get to this point.

About romaji, I completely understand the feeling, as I once wanted to only learn kana and simple kanji. You can try it, but if yo u're like me, you'll eventually hit a wall where you get frustrated with not being able to read. At the least I would suggest learning kana.

there are lots of times when romaji is ambiguous in referring to kana... and there are lots of different weird spellings that pop up for kana. recently i saw potyaj for ぽっちゃ.
and vice-versa,
ro can be either ろ or ろう
tu can be つ or テゥ
ti can be ち or てぃ
o can be を or お

there are lots of these kinds of situations once you get past the most basic vocabulary. the problem really is that english has way more sounds than japanese, so these kinds of conflicts occur whenever sounds don't line up perfectly.

the best argument against this strategy would simply be that romaji as a system is such a poor equivalent for the japanese syllabary.

i have an american friend who watches a lot of baseball and always loves to complain whenever the announcers pronounce the name 松坂大輔 (matsuzaka daisuke) as dai-soo-ki.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea for beginners. I think you'll quickly start to see diminishing returns though. I remember a textbook I used having an occasional passage of pure romaji, and it was a nightmare for me to understand.

Since kana, and by extension furigana, is so easy to learn, I don't think there's much of an argument for doing only one or the other. Use romaji if it helps you memorise vocab, but why deny yourself all the great native materials available in kana/furigana?

I do not quite agree with this argument. There is actually a pretty good one-to-one correspondence between hiragana and romaji (in fact, there are even two : Hepburn and Nihon-shiki [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization]).

The examples you give concern mostly katakana transcription of foreign words, which can be performed more or less accurately, depending on whether one is willing or not to use special character combinations which do not occur for Japanese words written in hiragana.

Long vowels can easily be noted in romaji by using the same character pairs as in hiragana.

Of course this does not mean that the romanization will allow an English speaker to pronounce the words correctly in Japanese without prior training. But this is a problem of English, not Japanese romanization. By the way, the problem is considerably simpler for Spanish speakers, whose writing system is closer to the romanized-Japanese one.

So, whether one should use romaji, rather than hiragana is not primarily related to the accuracy of the transcription. One might rather consider the trade off between being fully immersed in the Japanese writing system even before getting fluent with kanji, and benefiting from a more familiar visual environment (the latin alphabet) which some people find profitable for memorizing new vocabulary.

RandomQuotes Wrote:If your not interested in reading at all, then go for it. However, if you plan on learning to read or take the JLPT at some point you should just suck it up and learn both kana, and kanji. The kanji will be particularly helpful with figure out what books are saying cause of the god awful amounts of homophones. If your saying you remember it faster, yea of course, you're not used to it. It's like when Japanese beginners write everything in katakana. Sure it's doable, but its not ideal, and in the end its not really the language at hand. ライク、イフアイウロートイングリシュライクディス、イットウッドビーベーリーハードツリード。

The last sentence made me laugh out loud. I worked as an English teacher in Japan for 2 years

Learning with romaji is fine and all, but I don't really see the point. It takes a couple of hours to learn hiragana, and a couple of weeks of exposure to get your reading of it up to speed. And as Stansfield123 said - you can easily from there read stuff with furigana, which lets you pick up kanji without extra work. I don't see what the benefit of sticking with romaji is - you're just delaying the inevitable for something you're going to discard at some point anyway.
Ultimately it's not very important where you start so long as you start, but it just seems like one of those small things that should be gotten out of the way to begin with seeing it takes so little effort.


Personally I've never found romaji to be 'stickier' than kana (having seen plenty of romaji song lyrics in anime opening song karaoke).