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Why does everyone hate romaji? | ||
Tags: Writing System | Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 25 of 28 17 February 2013 at 10:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by Arekkusu on 17 February 2013 at 10:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6126 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 26 of 28 17 February 2013 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I met this guy in a Sharedtalk chat room. He was in the navy and spent quite a bit of time in Japan, married a Japanese woman and had child and picked up a lot of the language by ear. He had only rudimentary ability with Kanji, though I'm sure he knew at least the Kana. Mostly in chat rooms the Japanese guys pretty much always use kanji, but sometimes this old American guy could just spit out long sentences in romaji. He also had very good listening comprehension -- much better than me. He sometimes had a few misspellings and other quirks, and sometimes he remembered things so wrong that the Japanese couldn't comprehend, but generally was able to communicate. Though, he basically had to force the chatroom into 'romaji mode' to participate.
So, I think it can be done. Maybe if you move there and immerse, and have some way to survive. But, here in the English-speaking land, you're going to run out of material to study once you get past beginner textbooks. Maybe if you find a very very patient skype partner, I don't know. But, why torture yourself? Why make this more difficult by trying to avoid learning some very basic things? Japanese is already hard enough, there's no point in adding additional obstacles. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 27 of 28 18 February 2013 at 12:25am | IP Logged | |||||
It's OK, I did work it out in the end. Actually the kanji was there too so it was relatively easy to get them into the dictionary and see what the correct kana reading was. I could even have decided that せっめんじょ was unlikely and "guessed backwards" to せんめんじょ. My complaint is merely that if the kana (せんめんじょ) had been there at the start then that's a few extra minutes that I'd not have lost forever. Ironically I've probably lost more than that on this thread alone, but at least I can justify that as a cathartic experience so it doesn't feel so bad :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| baskerville Trilingual Triglot Newbie Singapore scribeorigins.com Joined 4247 days ago 39 posts - 43 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: German*, Japanese Studies: Hungarian | Message 28 of 28 12 June 2013 at 2:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I used to teach a basic conversation class in Japanese and we used Romaji only. As
someone who studied Nihongo starting from Kana, it was a little difficult for me. There was the obvious problem of non-stardard Romanization of words like "Tokyo" which can be written as "Toukyou". Or what about "Tookyoo", which I saw in some books. To solve the problem, I just used "Tokyo" with a bar on top of the 2 O's to indicate the long sound. At the end of the course, some of my students eventually decided to enroll in a basic course that includes reading and writing Kana because they felt that the conversation course was a little lacking and they wanted to move their learning to the next level. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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