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> 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 - b
by 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.