.

Arupan Wrote:I say romaji is Spider-Man! (hope people will get the joke)

Spider-Man in action:


and this is his friend:
http://www.japancrush.com/2014/pictures/...mused.html

with some romaji thrown in:
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

dtcamero Wrote:ya honestly, I have seen some acerbic posts in retaliation, and acerbic posts trying to be humorous... but i've never seen people get nasty with each other in defense of romaji. this is a first to me... yudan vempele and tzadeck. you guys are being mean in replying to good-faith, constructively critical posts, in order to big up romaji. i don't know if it's more lame or shameful... hmm, more lame, or more shameful... have to think about it.

I admit I was mean to Stansfield a bit, but were Yudan and Vempele actually mean? Maybe just curt.

buonaparte Wrote:

Arupan Wrote:I say romaji is Spider-Man! (hope people will get the joke)

Spider-Man in action:
http://i61.tinypic.com/33msgah.png

and this is his friend:
http://www.japancrush.com/2014/pictures/...mused.html
http://i0.wp.com/www.japancrush.com/wp-c...=600%2C499
with some romaji thrown in:
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Hopefully this Japanese Batman isn't posing for pictures with tourists and then demanding that he be paid large tips (like in Times Square).

john555,
it's not about チップ, it's about 葉隱 and 千葉県.

I must admit I don't mind romaji. I always like to have something sensational to read, to cite a classic.

Samuel E. Martin - A Reference Grammar of Japanese

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Mart...inguist%29

buonaparte Wrote:Samuel E. Martin - A Reference Grammar of Japanese

It is ironic that if you simply want to learn the language, you are better off getting away from romaji as quickly as possible, and indeed better off never learning it in the first place. However, if you want to become a serious linguistic scholar, then suddenly it becomes necessary again as almost all serious linguistic texts are written in romaji and usually in its most ugly permutations.

I strongly disagree with the notion that it is "necessary" for a "serious student" to learn romaji though. I have never needed it in 11+ years of studying the language, other than when picking up weighty looking tomes in the bookshop intended for foreigners. Maybe that was true when Samuel E Martin learned Japanese (during WW2), but the world has moved on a bit since then - there are so many more resources available.

It doesn't matter if romaji sucks, plenty of very good resources use it.

You can't say the following books were written by amateurs:

Илья Шкловский - Библия переводчика с японского языка
Kaiser - Japanese A Comprehensive Grammar
Romuald Huszcza, Maho Ikushima, Jan Majewski - Gramatyka japońska
Н. И. Фельдман-Конрад - Японско-русский учебный словарь иероглифов

I used them all - they all have a romaji transcription: Japanese kanji/kana text + romaji below and a translation into English, Russian or Polish. It might be puzzling why they chose to use romaji, but the books ARE there and they are all VERY good.

I'd rather use a spaced hiragana transcription + audio, but the authors thought differently. Anyway, I prefer romaji transcription to furigana in learning/reference materials.

buonaparte Wrote:Anyway, I prefer romaji transcription to furigana in learning/reference materials.

Same with me.

My reader has kanji/kana plus a romaji transcription. The good thing about the romaji transcription is after you study the kanji/kana version you can test yourself by transcribing the romaji version into kanji/kana.

Here's what appears to be an old Japanese magazine with the title in romaji:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Japan-Fujin-Gaho...1c34d13427

Yes, Romaji is used occasionaly for titles of books, magazines, and video games. But that percentage is pretty small, an d to many Japanese, romaji isn't Japanese it's English, So they will do one of two things, eye skip over it or say something like "ローマ字がめんどくさいなぁ"

Japanese people can't read romaji fluently without practice, but they know it's Japanese, not English.

I'm not saying everyone, because that would be absurd, and maybe its the people I know personally, or maybe the area I'm in, but many people I know, see Latin letters and go "Oh this is English" then not read it, in the same way they think コンクール or マロン is English.

RandomQuotes Wrote:maybe its the people I know personally, or maybe the area I'm in, but many people I know, see Latin letters and go "Oh this is English" then not read it, in the same way they think コンクール or マロン is English.

Isn't that because it's romaji that's not being used in a natural situation? For example, a lot of companies in Japan have foreign language names, and a lot of them have Japanese names that are romanized. Since that's a common place to have Japanese words written in romaji, Japanese people take a second to determine whether or not a company name is a foreign word or a romanized Japanese name/word. But naturally no one would take the time to confirm romanized Japanese used in an uncommon situation--they'd just assume it was a foreign language.

Romaji is painful to read. Without the kanji to quickly separate similar sounding words, you are left trying to go through a list of homonyms and pick the best one that fits the sentence. Another problem is that sentences get too long, using 2 characters per kana.

The only thing it is good for is keyboard entry on a device.