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Why does everyone hate romaji? | ||
Tags: Writing System | Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Tannimun Triglot Newbie Norway Joined 4638 days ago 3 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, English Studies: Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 28 13 February 2013 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been checking out Japanese the last couple of days and searching around on forums. What was surprising to me was all the hate towards romaji. There's a lot of articles and threads on forums where people recommend against learning romaji.
When I see romaji I directly relate it to the mandarin counterpart: pinyin. As I'm told, most children in China have to learn pinyin. They learn it so that they know how to pronunciate characters and to be able to write on computers. Also, most research I've read regarding pinyin says that chinese children who learn pinyin before characters, have a much faster learning curve than the others. So I can't see why people recommend against learning romaji. But then maybe romaji isn't as good a system as pinyin is. I just can't see the difference between them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5836 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 2 of 28 14 February 2013 at 12:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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In Japanese once you have learnt hiragana and katakana there is no need for romaji. The Japanese syllabaries reflect Japanese pronunciation better. With Mandarin you need to rely on pinyin to learn the pronunciation of new hanzi. In Japanese you can use kana to learn the pronunciation of new kanji. You are just holding yourself back if you continue to use romaji longer than is necessary.
PS everybody and everyone take a singular verb in English. Edited by stelingo on 14 February 2013 at 12:12am 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| stifa Triglot Senior Member Norway lang-8.com/448715 Joined 4877 days ago 629 posts - 813 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Japanese, Spanish | Message 3 of 28 14 February 2013 at 12:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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EDIT: stelingo explained it better than I did, read that^
Romaji isn't the same as pinyin. Japanese children start with hiragana, which consists of just 40 or so characters (others are based on these). This eliminates the need for romaji, because learning kana is almost as simple as learning cyrillic. Also, the longer you put off learning kanji, the more pain will they cause. Japanese people never use romaji unless they have to, so why should you? Also, the few times I see romaji, it is often very kana based, like using sya instead of sha to express しゃ Edited by stifa on 14 February 2013 at 12:15am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4851 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 4 of 28 14 February 2013 at 1:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think if you are only interested in speaking Japanese, and speaking only, then romaji is fine.
But if you want to do any kind of reading or writing, my advice is to learn hiragana and katakana as soon as possible, and wean yourself off of romaji, for obvious reasons. Even for speaking, I think that knowing hiragana and katakana is better for learning proper Japanese pronunciation. I'll give you a very good example: one of the students in my high school class is named はんい. If you put that in romaji, then his name is Hani. But that leads you to say something like "honey", which is wrong. If you say "honey", then Japanese people will think you are saying はに when you should be saying はんい. There is no proper way to equally express that combination of sounds into romaji, as far as I am aware of. Maybe Han-i? But there shouldn't be a pause after Han. The ん and the い do not have a pause between them, yet need to be pronounced separately. Anyway, I don't think there is a hate for romaji. If anything, maybe there is a hate for kanji, because it makes it more difficult to read Japanese. But they don't use romaji in Japanese except for typing and things like that, so it's better to bypass it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ericspinelli Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5787 days ago 249 posts - 493 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Italian | Message 5 of 28 14 February 2013 at 6:46am | IP Logged | |||||
There is no reason to not learn romaji. The cost is minuscule and it is useful as both a learning tool and as an electronic input method. All native Japanese speakers are familiar with romaji (it is taught in schools around 3rd or 4th grade), but use of romaji by natives is limited and use by learners should reflect that. I believe what most people mean is: "Learn romaji, but don't limit yourself to it."
The convention I see most often is use of an apostrophe, therefore Han'i. One example off the top of my head is the name 國井善弥, transcribed as Kunii Zen'ya. Edited by ericspinelli on 14 February 2013 at 6:46am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6089 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 6 of 28 14 February 2013 at 11:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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I used to do text chatting with a Japanese who could already do some English. Through text chatting, I discovered very quickly that I wasn't able to use kanji very well, at least not at that speed. I used romanji because it was the only way to keep the converstation going without saying, "okay stop, I have to go study these kanji better."
He used romanji too, but he admitted that it made it harder for him to understand me because he had to go through that extra step of "latin alphabet" to get to the word. Since he reassured me that all Japanese learned romanji and could use it if necessary, I just kept on writing it....at least until he got tired of it, which he didn't say, our conversations usually just fizzled out. I reluctantly had to give up my crutch since it made the conversation more difficult for my partner, which wasn't doing me any good, really. Edited by Sunja on 14 February 2013 at 11:04am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4669 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 7 of 28 14 February 2013 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree with almost everything above.
The first problem is that there is no such thing romaji. In Japanese it's ローマじ, which, when turned back into latin script becomes roumaji or maybe roomaji. Having fixed the pronunciation, the next problem is that there isn't just one ローマじ, there are several. None of them (AFAICT) simply back into the original Japanese syllables, so you sometimes end up having to guess how to pronounce or type something. Let's say your text gives "Tokyo" as Tokyo (and pretend that I'd bothered to work out how to put a macron over each "o"). Now you go to tangorin.com and want to type that in. Do you go for "tookyoo" or "toukyou" or one of the other two possibilities? With a more complicated example you'll end up wasting a chunk of time. I can see how the kanji look daunting, but the kana (hiragana + katakana) are really very simple and can be mastered in a few weeks even at a leisurely pace. It will take some time before you can read kana as quickly as you can read roumaji, but I found it to be well worth the effort. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5986 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 8 of 28 14 February 2013 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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One of the biggest issues for me is lack of standardisation. Some systems differentiate between ou and oo, others write both as o with a macron. Some make the hani/han'i distinction, others don't. Some use an initial consonant to match the ordering of kana characters, others match phonetically (so you might see either si or shi for the character し). And different systems may place word boundaries in different places.
Having learned kana from the outset, I find it quite difficult at times to recognise familiar words written in romaji. I think the reason for the lack of standardisation may be because the standard way for Japanese people to write Japanese words phonetically is in kana. A lot of different romanization systems seem to be used in texts supposedly to make it easier for learners, but in the long run I think it makes it harder. It also makes the idea of learning kana more daunting, when actually it is neither difficult nor time consuming (unlike kanji, which could become a lifelong project). And it makes me cringe when people tell me they want to use romaji because they are only interested in the spoken language. I think if you really don't care for literacy, just stick to audio only resources and be done with it! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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