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As an adult student of the language, my experience is that I was glad to start without the crutch of romaji, for a simple practical reason - Japanese quickly be
by yborg 10y ago
As an adult student of the language, my experience is that I was glad to start without the crutch of romaji, for a simple practical reason - Japanese quickly becomes tedious to read Romanized. Kanji + kana are much more compact, and things like the conjugation of a verb and doubled letters which are common in the language are immediately obvious - because the writing system is designed to accommodate them.
Learning 2500 kanji from the beginning is a major cognitive task that shouldn't be a primary focus, nor is it in native Japanese language pedagogy. But learning the kana is simple, again I learned them as an adult and had them down cold in a few weeks of active classwork. My kanji retention is terrible, but learning materials almost always give the reading of kanji using furigana, and there are useful tools for annotating web pages, etc. with furi readings.
- stordoff 10y ago> Kanji + kana are much more compact, and things like the conjugation of a verb and doubled letters which are common in the language are immediately obvious - because the writing system is designed to accommodate them. My grasp of Japanese is virtually non-existent, but I noticed this as well. Taking an example from the post, I find something like しっけ easier to parse than the romaji shikke. The latter form just feels clumsy for reasons I can't really articulate. It also makes the pronunciation a little easier at times. If I read "desu", I read it with a fairly pronounced "u" sound. Reading です, on the other hand, I know without really thinking about it that the う sound is typically very short.
- ramparrt 10y agoI think it's because most hiragana/katakana is in the form "consonant-vowel" meaning that almost all words are made up of collections of 2 letter sounds/syllables. This gives words a certain cadence which is easily repeated. When you convert that to romaji you begin to parse the words as though they were english and the discrete "consonant-vowel" sounds get broken down and become harder to see/read. Really though, you can learn hiragana in a single sitting using mnemonic trickery and you can commit it to memory using a spaced repetition or flashcard system in a few days. Not learning hiragana and katakana seems much more of a hindrance than "wasting time" by learning it.