ahibba Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:No, you won't.

Romaji doesn't save you any time anyway, only complete beginners have problems reading kana. If you learn faster with romaji, it just means you need more exposure to kana. Therefor, it's a bad idea to use romaji what so ever.

Excuse me, Tobberoth. This time I totally disagree with you.

Using romaji at the beginning (or even in the intermediate stages) is not a problem at all.

If you memorized a large amount of vocabulay using romaji, you will easily read the kanji once you learned the readings. (my proof is that Japanese learn the readings of kanji easily because they have enough vocabulary, they learned it without reading kana. So you can do the same, learn as much vocabulary as you can using something you know very well, whether it's romaji, or audio if you are auditory.)

Kana is similar to romaji, so there is no big difference if you use either of them. But reading romaji is faster.

Reading romaji is only faster because one isn't used to kana, and that's a problem. If you aim to be fluent in Japanese, you have to read kana fluently anyway. "I use romaji because it's faster than kana" simply means "I haven't learned to read kana well, so I'm not going to for a considerable future".

That it's faster to learn kanji in compounds you already know isn't completely true, and your example with Japanese people is misguided. Of course it's easier to learn a word you already know. Learning which kanji to use is NOT easier though, it's MUCH easier to remember which kanji to use if you learn the word when you already know the kanji. I'm the living example, I passed JLPT2 before starting to use RtK. As a result, I have to "relearn" lots of words I can understand and read fluently, because I don't actually know which kanji are used. When I learn new words however, I already know the kanji so it's a simple puzzle. My point being, if you "already know the word using romaji", you're still going to have to relearn it to learn the kanji, and learning it first with romaji and then with kanji won't save you any time (though it will let you output japanese MUCH faster, which can be a good thing in some situations, a bad thing in other situations).

ahibba Wrote:I don't know where are you from. But for me, if I learn a word in any system I know (romaji, kana, kanji, or even spoken not written) I can recognize it easily when I see it in another system that I know.

How long have you been studying Japanese? All I am saying is that it will actually improve your kana performance if you push it right now. Also, kana and eventually kanji will improve your pronunciation of vocabulary beyond the abilities of romaji unless you are utilizing accent marks and the likes. Seriously, romaji is not practical as you will almost never see it in use, so why use it as a crutch? You yourself said that you were faster at romaji; therefore, kana clearly isn't "easy" to recognize yet. Practice makes perfect. People were giving you (and anyone else considering romaji as a better mode than kana) advice to help you improve. If someone gave me advice I would consider it and at least try to understand why they may think a different way. Just think about it and consider everyone's input.

I agree with the rest of them. In fact, I think that romaji is not only a detriment to English speakers studying Japanese, but also to Japanese speakers learning English. I blame romaji (and soccer, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish) whenever one of my students reads "I come to school by bike," as "I こめ to school by bike."

Tobberoth Wrote:you're still going to have to relearn it to learn the kanji, and learning it first with romaji and then with kanji won't save you any time (though it will let you output japanese MUCH faster, which can be a good thing in some situations, a bad thing in other situations).

Here we disagree. You think it won't save any time, but I think it will. E.g. if you need 1 year to lean them with kanji, you will need 6-8 months only to learn with romaji first then relearn them with kanji. (actually, you need less than that)

dat5h Wrote:How long have you been studying Japanese?

I have not started learning Japanese yet. But this does not mean I don't know what I am talking about! I have good linguistic knowledge and good experience in learning other languages.

dat5h Wrote:Also, kana and eventually kanji will improve your pronunciation of vocabulary beyond the abilities of romaji unless you are utilizing accent marks and the likes.

Not true. Many Asian languages changed their writing to the latin script, and people do not face any problems in pronunciation in these languages.

Ok, since you haven't really begun learning Japanese yet I see what you are saying, to an extent. (though, you should begin immediately if you plan to actually learn Japanese) There are a few points where you will have trouble, in my opinion.

1. You immediate plow through all vocab with romaji may blend your native language with Japanese eg. syllables may not seem as strict as they should be in Japanese, r's may sound wrong, etc...

2. Words with the same romaji will sound the same to you and thus confuse you when you hear them.

3. Additionally, your pronunciation will suffer in that you will have no background in intonations associated with the kanji. Incorrect intonations can and do confuse native speakers. (This problem is generally considered high level, but I write it merely to suggest it as a place first year Japanese teachers should actually focus. Personally, I find proper intonations to be very important since I want to actually sound natural. Robotic Japanese sounds awful to my ears.)

4. Where is the context? Giant blocks of vocabulary will only fade in your memory without contextual understanding. Many words will have the same English translation but will be used in different contexts, which is aided by prior understanding of kanji.

5. This is all not to mention that your reading ability will be weak since you are avoiding the eventual need to jump into kana. Do it now and you will be thankful.

In hindsight, I wish I had started Japanese by learning the kanji first or at least within the first year of study.

Whatever you end up doing, track how well it works and let the rest of us know if it's useful. Also, if i am not mistaken you said in another thread that you are going to Japan soon which makes me wonder why you haven't begun studying yet. Get on it! Whatever method works for you will improve you beyond ground-state, at least.

Are you planning to spend 6 years to learn 1000 kanji? If not, then don't use Japanese kids as an example.

Knowing the kanji is useful for learning Japanese compounds. Without them it's similar to learning language by memorizing phrases from a phrase book without knowing what the individual words mean. It's a lot harder to learn a lot of them, less practical, and not useful once you encounter something that you haven't memorized yet.

That's why I think if you're going to learn words first without kanji, don't do more than a couple of thousand, because the rest will be easier if you first attach kanji to the ones you know, and then proceed on to the rest with kanji - thanks to repetition, signal primitives, etc.

dat5h Wrote:1. You immediate plow through all vocab with romaji may blend your native language with Japanese eg. syllables may not seem as strict as they should be in Japanese, r's may sound wrong, etc...

Fortunately, I don't have this problem. When I am knowing that I'm reading German for example, my brain automatically convert the d or g in the last syllable to t and k (so bald become balt, wand > vant, tag > tak and so on.)

When I'm knowing that I'm reading Japanese, my brain automatically read "to" for example as it is in Japanese, not as "to" in English. As for r and the rest of sounds (t, k, n, etc.) they are the same as in my language. In fact, I have some problems with the English R not the Japanese one!

dat5h Wrote:2. Words with the same romaji will sound the same to you and thus confuse you when you hear them.

Why they do not confuse the illiterate Japanese or those who learned the spoken Japanese only? Because the context will make the meaning clear.

dat5h Wrote:4. Where is the context? Giant blocks of vocabulary will only fade in your memory without contextual understanding. Many words will have the same English translation but will be used in different contexts, which is aided by prior understanding of kanji.

Learning with romaji does not mean you only memorize words. You can read novels written entirely in romaji.

dat5h Wrote:5. This is all not to mention that your reading ability will be weak since you are avoiding the eventual need to jump into kana. Do it now and you will be thankful.

If your initial goal is the spoken language (which is logical), then this is not a problem. The written form comes later.

If romaji is a waste of time, why a pioneer language teaching company like Linguaphone used it in their courses?

vosmiura Wrote:That's why I think if you're going to learn words first without kanji, don't do more than a couple of thousand, because the rest will be easier if you first attach kanji to the ones you know, and then proceed on to the rest with kanji - thanks to repetition, signal primitives, etc.

Yes, I agree with you.

2500 to 3000 words is enough in the first stages. Then the kanji comes.

ahibba Wrote:If romaji is a waste of time, why a pioneer language teaching company like Linguaphone used it in their courses?

Is that supposed to be impressive?

They probably used romaji because they want to sell their course to a lot of people who want to 'dabble' in Japanese, but are not serious enough to become literate.

I don't think romaji is the evil that some people claim it to be. It's perfectly OK to use it when introducing Japanese to complete beginners. But it should be natural to want to move away from it as soon as you can, simply because whether you like it or not that's not how Japanese is written. If after learning your first 100-200 words you still don't want to learn to read hiragana and katakana, there is a problem.

vosmiura Wrote:Is that supposed to be impressive?

They probably used romaji because they want to sell their course to a lot of people who want to 'dabble' in Japanese, but are not serious enough to become literate.

It seems that you don't know Linguaphone. How time goes by.

***

No one answered this question: What is the problem in learning the spoken language first and postponing the written language?

ahibba Wrote:It seems that you don't know Linguaphone. How time goes by.

Enlighten me.

Quote:No one answered this question: What is the problem in learning the spoken language first and postponing the written language?

How many foreign languages have you learned without reading some books in that language?

Reading the real language is a useful tool for learning a language, and Japanese books are not written in romaji, so you're going to have a limited amount of reading that you can do.

ahibba Wrote:Learning with romaji does not mean you only memorize words. You can read novels written entirely in romaji.

I don't even know anymore what to say!
Yea you stick to your ABC.

ahibba Wrote:It seems that you don't know Linguaphone. How time goes by.

Indeed, and you're a prime example, mr. Ahibba why don't you do less TALKING and more action if you 'know' so much about linguistics and obviously you're full of 'super ideas'. All you do here is talk about your super pioneering mega theories and in the meantime you're still not fluent, oh... I forgot, you haven't 'started' yet. If you'd put some of that effort into actually learning some Japanese, you might be able to read kana by the end of the year.

ahibba Wrote:No one answered this question: What is the problem in learning the spoken language first and postponing the written language?

Since you're such a linguist with tons of experience, you can answer it yourself.

vosmiura Wrote:Enlighten me.

The old Linguaphone is not something like Hodder's Teach yourself, Berlitz, Living language, Rosetta Stone, or even Pimsleur. They were the first language training company to recognise the potential of combining the traditional written course with audio recordings, and they knew well what they did.

vosmiura Wrote:Reading the real language is a useful tool for learning a language, and Japanese books are not written in romaji, so you're going to have a limited amount of reading that you can do.

I agree with you. But there are thousands of Japanese e-texts in the internet (e.g. Aozoro Bunko), and you can easily convert these texts to romaji with some editing for less than %15 of the converted texts.

Musashi Wrote:If you'd put some of that effort into actually learning some Japanese, you might be able to read kana by the end of the year

I read them already. I learned the kana in 3 days like many people did. (one day for hiragana, two for katakana)

IceCream Wrote:I think, for lots of people though, actually seeing the Kanji helps secure the meaning in your mind. Some people, once they start learning Kanji, even find a children's book in hiragana harder to read than a book with Kanji because of this.

So if the Americans succeeded in their attempt to change the Japanese writing to latin script after WWII, those people would face insurmountable difficulties!

Quote:Hey people, it seems that you forgot that I was talking to Transparent_Aluminium not to you! Look at this and you will understand:

http://kanji.koohii.com/showprofile.php … _Aluminium

I can see why you assumed that I didn't know any kanji but I'm just not using this site. I do know quite a good number of them.

Quote:So if the Americans succeeded in their attempt to change the Japanese writing to latin script after WWII, those people would face insurmountable difficulties!

I wonder if written Japanese would still be understandable using only romaji. I guess it should be. After all, there are such things as audiobooks. Maybe some of the Chinese speakers could answer the question about their language. Would Chinese be readable with only pinyin?

I don't think that it would be practical for learning though. Kanji makes learning words much easier. I learned Japanese for quite a while without learning any kanji. It seemed too hard so I avoided it. When I actually learned the characters, everything became much easier. Words suddenly made sense. They were not just jumbles of similar sounding syllables anymore.

And I would be curious to know what languages you know / have learned ahibba.

ahibba Wrote:

avparker Wrote:He's exhausted after doing 44 words.
10000 (JLPT1 vocab) words in 4 weeks is 357 words a day.
Even 12 weeks is 119 words a day.
Good luck with that

It seems that you don't know who is Keith. Read more about him, and you will understand.

Sorry, I don't get your point. I had a look at his web page, he's a guy learning Japanese (and Chinese), and he's trying to find a good way to do it.
That doesn't change the fact that he found learning 44 words in 2 hours (plus breaks)　difficult. Unless he's terribly bad at it, that makes learning 357 words a day pretty damn hard.
Please explain what I'm supposed to understand (really, I'm interested).

ahibba Wrote:I don't know where are you from. But for me, if I learn a word in any system I know (romaji, kana, kanji, or even spoken not written) I can recognize it easily when I see it in another system that I know.

I thought you didn't know Kanji?

I would agree that if you know a word in romaji, then you should know it in kana (e.g. gakkou == がっこう). But that's definitely not the same as knowing that がっこう　＝＝　学校, even if you know RTK.

I still think that you are better off just using kana
i.e. I don't think you save anything by using
gakkou school
hon book
tsukue desk

instead of

がっこう　　school
ほん　　　　book
つくえ　　　desk

I suppose we can agree to disagree

Transparent_Aluminium Wrote:

ahibba Wrote:So if the Americans succeeded in their attempt to change the Japanese writing to latin script after WWII, those people would face insurmountable difficulties!

I wonder if written Japanese would still be understandable using only romaji. I guess it should be. After all, there are such things as audiobooks.

I'm just reading "Making sense of Japanese" by Jay Rubbin at the moment, and all his Japanese sentences are in romaji. As someone who knows (most of) RTK but doesn't have a big vocabulary, it's much harder to read than the same sentences with Kanji.

I also read some all-kana childrens' books after completing RTK last year, and it was harder than reading more advanced books that had kanji, even though the grammar and vocab are simpler.

Japanese has a smaller set of sounds than English (and most other languages I guess), so this means there are lots of homonyms. Even the fact that a lot of words sound similar made it hard for me to learn vocab. Using Kanji (assuming you know RTK) actually helps to make words more distinct.

ahibba Wrote:I agree with you. But there are thousands of Japanese e-texts in the internet (e.g. Aozoro Bunko), and you can easily convert these texts to romaji with some editing for less than %15 of the converted texts.

I wouldn't have said it's easy. Parsing Japanese is hard. Even the best automated method would make many mistakes or come up with many alternatives, and without having the experience of reading natural Japanese you won't have an easy time to fix them yourself unless you have furigana available to check.

avparker Wrote:Unless he's terribly bad at it

Yes, he is terribly bad at it. Keith does not represent the average user of Iversen's method. Iversen himself, I, and many others can learn 200-300 words/hour. But most people can learn up to 100/hour using this method.

avparker Wrote:I still think that you are better off just using kana
i.e. I don't think you save anything by using
gakkou school
hon book
tsukue desk

instead of

がっこう　　school
ほん　　　　book
つくえ　　　desk

Do you agree that reading kanji is faster than kana?

High-speed readers of English (or any language written in lating script) read the words as one block like kanji. I read the word "school" as fast as reading 学校 if not faster (because I see the English as one block where 学校 are two). The same thing apply to the romanized form "gakkou". I read it faster than がっこう. (which my brain see it as 4 blocks while gakkou is one.)

avparker Wrote:Japanese has a smaller set of sounds than English (and most other languages I guess), so this means there are lots of homonyms. Even the fact that a lot of words sound similar made it hard for me to learn vocab. Using Kanji (assuming you know RTK) actually helps to make words more distinct.

The same thing in Malay, Tagoalog, Vietnames, but if you are used to the latin script, you wouldn't face any problem.

ahibba Wrote:Yes, he is terribly bad at it. Keith does not represent the average user of Iversen's method. Iversen himself, I, and many others can learn 200-300 words/hour. But most people can learn up to 100/hour using this method.

This is true. I do 200 words per hour using the method.

However that is just the beginning - getting the words in medium term memory.

The amount of review necessary to maintain that memory is what makes the numbers unsustainable. Say I spent 8 hours and learned 1600 words. The next day I'd probably need more than 4 hours just to review those words (assuming nothing forgotten), which would leave less time for learning new ones.

Yes, I agree with you.

You can dedicate 1 hour/day for new words, 1 hour for reviewing. Reviewing is faster than learning new words. So if you learn 100 words/hour, you can review 200-300/hour.

After 1-3 months, stop learning new words, and keep reviewing the old ones for another 3 months. Then resume the learning.

When did this thread devolve into the "JLPT 1 in 3 months" rant all over again? I don't mind your crackpot theories, ahibba, but please let's not turn every topic into a debate on that subject.

Sorry for fueling the debate as it were (what was this topic originally about again anyway?)...but...

ahibba Wrote:High-speed readers of English (or any language written in lating script) read the words as one block like kanji. I read the word "school" as fast as reading 学校 if not faster (because I see the English as one block where 学校 are two). The same thing apply to the romanized form "gakkou". I read it faster than がっこう. (which my brain see it as 4 blocks while gakkou is one.)

...it really doesn't take all that long to get used to kana. I've been studying just over 3 months now and I can read がっこう (or 学校) just as fast as I can read gakkou. So there's really no reason you would want to use romaji, since it provides no benefits other than familiarity- and it doesn't take very long for that to cease to be true.

Quote:The same thing in Malay, Tagoalog, Vietnames, but if you are used to the latin script, you wouldn't face any problem.

I don't know about the other languages but I can tell you that this is not true of Malay/Indonesian. When I studied Indonesian I never had any problems with homonyms caused by a small syllabary. Its just not an issue. Japanese, on the other hand, has a lot of homonyms that you need to tell apart by context alone.

ahhh cannot sort out the quoting syntax, too many replies in replies.

To the person who struggled with Romaji. I also struggle. I use kana/kanji and only touch romaji to type into my PC. If I didn't do that I would be even worse. But give me a page of romanized Japanese and I have to read it out and I sometimes then miss stupidly easy words.

When I had a class using romaji at the start. Later on they learned kana (I already knew it) they could not spell the words correctly, and didn't know if it was a loan word or not, so wrote some things in hiragana wrongly. The teacher also wasn't great at romaji and would spell things wrong that she spelt ok in kana.

This seems similar to when you know 1000 words in vocab - written. But if you listen to those words even at a slow pace you would miss half of them

Romaji sucks and should be dropped asap, but so many places use it you end up having to know it. My great kanji dictionary uses romaji ;-(

When I tried a phase of trying to read books I got some kids books. I failed miserably. All that kana is a mare. They use casual when most text books teach polite/formal first. They use loads of vocab you don't see in text books - animal sounds etc. Even with a hard book you can do a wild guess with kanji, even if you don't know that much. And if you know quite a few conjugations you can even guess some of the whats going on.

I am a bit at a loss why this was a software qu and now is a romaji sucks argument?

ahibba Wrote:No one answered this question: What is the problem in learning the spoken language first and postponing the written language?

Nothing. But what is wrong with learning them at the same time, with more or less the same effort?