Ash_S Wrote:Hey, if you want some good japanese listening material for Igo check out
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYeX5w … d1A/videos and
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChBH0K … cQQ/videos

Thanks for that. As it happens I watched this one the other day.

Check out 22:41 when commenter 張豊猷八段 makes a joseki blunder :lol:

PMotte Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:

PMotte Wrote:Fact is: Japanese don't use it.

...except when typing on keyboard.

That's something I don't get.
Why don't they use keyboards with kana on it? A set of hiragana as basic layout, and a set of katakana using the SHIFT keys? Combined of course with a computer program to select kanji.
I think those keyboards exist.
In my view it would be very unnatural for a Japanse to type "ki" to get to "き".
There are enough keys on our keyboards to, to put all hiragana on it.

The majority of keyboards sold in Japan have hiragana on them, so the option is open to Japanese people. Few people use the kana input, though, so apparently they find the romaji input easier to use. I don't know why, but it may just be that it's easier for fast typing to remember the location of 20-something keys vs. 40+.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I don't know why, but it may just be that it's easier for fast typing to remember the location of 20-something keys vs. 40+.

I'm looking at my Japanese keyboard and I think the main reason why is poor layout. To get all the kana on you have to also use the number keys and those are always a little awkward to hit. But ya, I think 20 vs 40 memorization also plays a big role. Also learning to touch type with the alphabet also translates to being able to type English as well.

Maybe I should just install a separate computer to do my Japanese things.

I did a lot of research on Japanese computer keyboards a few years ago. That included seeing what options were available (e.g. buying a JDM computer, buying a new Japanese keyboard, buying a latex keyboard overlay, buying new keys, buying stickers for keys, using IME, etc.). I also thought the trackpad, my phone, or an external wacom bamboo would be a neat way to input kanji, especially for anki.

That research eventually lead to asking dozens of Tokyo college students and "salarymen" how they (and their colleagues) input Japanese. I also keenly observed dozens of office workers "in action."

Never found one person who used a kana keyboard; they used an IME essentially sounding out romaji even though the kana was "printed" on the keyboard. I never thought about asking if the Japanese had learned how to use the kana keys

Some of the middle-aged guys I spoke with guessed that use of the kana keyboard might be a carryover from manual typewriters, or maybe was used on computers in the 80s (or before)...

Japanese keyboards typically have keys which share kana & roman letters, but from a practical perspective, the kana letters appear to be a historic carryover. Japanese keyboards have a few special keys (some special characters, a useful hotkey to swap among character sets, unfortunately reduced-sized space bar and enter keys, etc.)

I would not suggest buying a separate Japanese computer. The IME in Windows and OSX are fine. Furthermore, Japanese domestic computers will have a bunch of odd settings that never really play well with western computers. The obvious one for US people is the use of A4 paper formatting, but the list of painful incompatibilities goes on and on.

In any case, I always think it's interesting that so many Japanese people use romaji on a daily basis. It's a good indication that Japanese people don't really have a big problem thinking of Japanese without the usual writing system.

PMotte Wrote:Maybe I should just install a separate computer to do my Japanese things.

If you want to keep the japanese environment and the non-japanese one separate I think you can make two separate users on the same pc. If I remember right every user has his own personal language bar with his own customizable set of languages.

scooter1 Wrote:That research eventually lead to asking dozens of Tokyo college students and "salarymen" how they (and their colleagues) input Japanese. I also keenly observed dozens of office workers "in action."

Never found one person who used a kana keyboard; they used an IME essentially sounding out romaji even though the kana was "printed" on the keyboard. I never thought about asking if the Japanese had learned how to use the kana keys.

I'm curious about something. What version of romaji did you see Japanese people use? Was it kunrei siki (e.g., "matu" for "matsu") or would they type "matsu" with the "s"? Thanks.

I don't think any half-decent typist would ever type more keystrokes than necessary. Still, there's a choice between ji and zi; sha and sya; cha and tya; fu and hu.

(I think you can also use c as a substitute for s and q as a substitute for k).

Good question John555- I'm not sure.

Without making any changes, the Windows 7 IME accepted both "full" romaji and some "abbreviated" versions. I never tried to figure out the abbreviated romaji, so just typed full romaji. That said sometimes I would make a mistake typing in few letters and some random kana letter would pop up - an "abbreviated" surprise.

Because the Japanese typed so quickly, I just assumed the they were using the abbreviated versions. I don't remember asking anyone about that.

It's amazing ... I'm glad I brought it up.
Thank you all for the input.

I think Japanese people would tend to use the kunrei-shiki because it's what they learn a little bit of in elementary school and it's closer to what they're used to with kanji.

(Personally I use some of both -- I mostly use kunrei-shiki but sometimes I mix in hepburn. I never use "tsu" or "chi", though.)

PMotte Wrote:"Romaji
By the way: the correct roumaji spelling of roumaji is "roumaji", not "romaji", which might partly explain why you think it's not accurate.
It's accurate enough.
Fact is: Japanese don't use it.

There is not really any "correct spelling" of Romaji in Romaji. The Japanese spelling is ローマ字, indicating that the vowel is long.

I agree that roumaji indicates the long "o". But there is no single standard for representing kana in Romaji which is one of the problems. "Roumaji" tends to imply that the word is written ろうまじ, which it isn't. I do agree that if one spells it Romaji it should properly have an accent over the o to indicate length, if one is trying to write romanized Japanese.

However, I was not trying to write romanized Japanese, I was using Romaji as an Anglicized term (Google it and you will see that it is quite commonly done). I don't write Tokyo as Toukyou in English either.

Interestingly,if we pronounce the o in Romaji like the o in Rome (which it is derived from, and which most people, I think do) then we are in fact pronouncing it "long". The English "long o" is actually a diphthong, not a pure vowel which makes it a two-mora sound by Japanese standards (though it is confusing to mix the two). This is not a coincidence, since the long o in ローマ字 is intended to represent the pronunciation of Rome/Roma anyway.

I prefer to capitalize it in English since it the first part is Roma which is a proper noun. But that's just me. There is no "correct" here. Just various ways of representing one system by another.

In Japanese I always type tu, ti to get つ and ち just because it seems a bit pointless to make extra keystrokes.

yudantaiteki Wrote:In any case, I always think it's interesting that so many Japanese people use romaji on a daily basis. It's a good indication that Japanese people don't really have a big problem thinking of Japanese without the usual writing system.

They type it easily enough but they find romanized Japanese a pain to read in any quantity. In fact they find all-kana a pain to read in any quantity. As do I.

PS - an interesting note on Romaji confusion (not really a point for or against Romanized Japanese just something funny really):

I was speaking to a Japanese person about Go! Princess Precure (Go! プリンセスプリキュア) and she asked if it was the fifth season. I said it was the eleventh and wondered why she thought it was the fifth.

Only afterward did I realize that, because the Go! in the title is written in Romaji I had mispronounced it with a short vowel as ゴ (which is regularly romanized as "go"), so it sounded like 五. Of course in English "go" is actually pronounced "gou" and (more or less) correctly transliterated in katakana as ゴー.

CureDolly Wrote:

PMotte Wrote:"Romaji
By the way: the correct roumaji spelling of roumaji is "roumaji", not "romaji", which might partly explain why you think it's not accurate.
It's accurate enough.
Fact is: Japanese don't use it.

There is not really any "correct spelling" of Romaji in Romaji. The Japanese spelling is ローマ字, indicating that the vowel is long.

I agree that roumaji indicates the long "o". But there is no single standard for representing kana in Romaji which is one of the problems.

The reader that I'm currently working my way through (Japanese: A Manual of Reading and Writing by Samuel Martin) has roomaji transcriptions and indicates long "o" like this: "oo". So "ookii" etc.

PMotte Wrote:I first have to switch from a French keyboard to an English one, and then choose Japanese IME. It's the first stage which can happen by accident.

It's just a matter of playing around with hotkeys... Are you using two or three keyboards?
For English and Japanese, you should only need one keyboard (Japanese), and just switch between input methods. I find that <Alt> + <`> (the key next to '1') is easy to use for switching the input method from English to ひらがな, but that probably won't be the case for anyone with small hands.
To make it faster, there might be a way to set a hotkey to switch directly from your French keyboard to the Japanese keyboard's ひらがな input method.

RE: Kana vs Romaji
Personally, I quit using romaji in my studies as soon as I learned the kana (aside from the inevitable checks early on). I felt it would be best to get used to using them as soon as possible.
It is a crutch that should be dropped as soon as possible, but you can't expect people to run on a newly injured foot (for an inaccurate analogy).

RE: OP
As has been said, I'd have taken the full knowledge of the meaning and use of 10,000 words in the beginning of my studies over the ability to distinguish kanji from one another (which I still think is the main benefit of RTK for those of us who won't be writing much).
My kanji studies took so little time compared to everything else that such an exchange would be like getting a pound of gold for a rusty old nail...

sholum Wrote:As has been said, I'd have taken the full knowledge of the meaning and use of 10,000 words in the beginning of my studies over the ability to distinguish kanji from one another (which I still think is the main benefit of RTK for those of us who won't be writing much).

If one isn't going to write kanji (and I rarely write English, so I can't see how I would), it is much more efficient, I would have said, to learn to distinguish one kanji from another on an ad-hoc basis. That is, if one is confusing two kanji, sit down with those two for a few minutes and clarify what distinguishes them. Adjust the stories accordingly if you are using stories. If you broadly know the kanji on a recognition basis already, it will stick.

Using RTK to simply distinguish between kanji is a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut I think.

CureDolly Wrote:

sholum Wrote:As has been said, I'd have taken the full knowledge of the meaning and use of 10,000 words in the beginning of my studies over the ability to distinguish kanji from one another (which I still think is the main benefit of RTK for those of us who won't be writing much).

If one isn't going to write kanji (and I rarely write English, so I can't see how I would), it is much more efficient, I would have said, to learn to distinguish one kanji from another on an ad-hoc basis. That is, if one is confusing two kanji, sit down with those two for a few minutes and clarify what distinguishes them. Adjust the stories accordingly if you are using stories. If you broadly know the kanji on a recognition basis already, it will stick.

Using RTK to simply distinguish between kanji is a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut I think.

I didn't really use RTK, just the order. I tried learning kanji before, both with and without vocabulary, and it just didn't work for me; after I looked through RTK and did a simple recognition deck, just using the keywords as placeholders, it became much easier to distinguish one kanji from another. I spent more time on it than I should've, in hindsight, but it was the second thing I studied in an orderly fashion for Japanese (first one being the kana) and my first time using Anki (or any SRS, for that matter).
I didn't even bother with proper stories, just loose association.

The point of that anecdote being: the order of RTK, which is based on simplicity in form rather than frequency, is effective at easing one into kanji.

Because I only suggest using it for the order, I always suggest people borrow RTK from a library, unless they plan to use it for writing.

Using Heisig for order is a very interesting idea and it certainly makes sense to me.

I didn't do that because I learned words not kanji, but if one is learning kanji that certainly makes sense. It also makes sense in the early stage of learning words to learn basic simple kanji first as Japanese children broadly do (despite the exceptions like 曜) since most of them are also components of other kanji.

This I would call the "pre-organic" stage since you can't start organic kanji-vocabulary learing until you have around 500 words and basic grammar. Actually you can but I wouldn't consider it the most efficient approach.

I too mostly don't make proper stories. Actually my "stories", where I have them, tend on the whole to be rather more abstract than the Heisig variety, pinning the combination of radicals conceptually more than graphically to the idea of the word. But that is just how my mind works.

I think some people might think that learning kanji as words means you don't get their full sense. Heisig-sensei's keywords are chosen to represent as far as possible the breadth of a kanji's meanings, I believe. I do actually check the kanji's range of meaning. Popping Rikaisama's search bar into your browser's toolbar (you don't need the whole Rikaisama toolbar) is a very quick and easy way of doing this.

However I don't use keywords at all, and my recognition of kanji does to revolve words. So, for example, if I encounter 警護　(keigo, bodyguard) for the first time I think 「あ、警察 (keisatsu, police)　のケイ、守護（shugo, protection, guarding, as in Shugo Chara) のゴ。」I might also have a sound-mnemonic like "bodyguards are polite (敬語を使うね）".

I think one works out a mix'n'match of various approaches that suits one's own personal learning style. That's what you seem to be doing. Ganbatte ne!

CureDolly Wrote:[...]
I think some people might think that learning kanji as words means you don't get their full sense. Heisig-sensei's keywords are chosen to represent as far as possible the breadth of a kanji's meanings, I believe. [...]

However I don't use keywords at all, and my recognition of kanji does to revolve words. So, for example, if I encounter 警護　(keigo, bodyguard) for the first time I think 「あ、警察 (keisatsu, police)　のケイ、守護（shugo, protection, guarding, as in Shugo Chara) のゴ。」I might also have a sound-mnemonic like "bodyguards are polite (敬語を使うね）".

This is more like what I do now (it's been about three and a half years since I practiced differentiating kanji that way), minus the sound mnemonic. And I haven't used keywords since I got settled into vocabulary study (about three years ago).

I think that this is the natural progression for a learner: at first, you don't really have any context for what you're learning (kanji and written vocabulary, in this case), so studying kanji with placeholders and using those to remember words can be very helpful, but after a while, it's just easier to think of words as being related to other words and the kanji they use.

Yes, I think the progression is natural. Sometimes I come across old words in my Anki and rember the silly mnemonics I used for them in the past (I sometimes note them on the backs of the cards), when now the words seem completely obvious either from regular use or from the kanji structure.

The sound mnemonic is an "optional extra" for me. Sometimes I use one, often not. Of course it isn't necessary if you are looking at the kanji (especially in this case where both of them only have one on-reading), but it can be a quicker mind-path when hearing. Like all mnemonic pegs, pins and dabs of glue one only keeps it until one has gotten used to the sound of the word in real use.

Also J-J mnemonics serve a double purpose. Of course the mnemonic word is one that one knows well, but I believe that one cannot "wear in" vocabulary too much. The aim is to whittle down the microseconds it takes to remember a known word to native level.