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If you're serious about wanting to learn Japanese, the first thing you need to do is remove the training wheels and start using kana. Romaji is meant squarely
by howlgarnish 6y ago
If you're serious about wanting to learn Japanese, the first thing you need to do is remove the training wheels and start using kana. Romaji is meant squarely at people who can't and don't intend to read Japanese, and for them "chi" is much closer to /ʧi/ than Kunrei's "ti", even though it violates the symmetry of the た行 and thus obscures some verb conjugations the casual reader won't care about.
As for pitch accents, Japanese is only very weakly tonal and what tone there exists is regional to boot, so nobody is going to get confused if you order nihon of beer with the wrong tone. (This is manifestly not the case for, say, Chinese.)
- marcan_42 6y agoJapanese is not weakly tonal, that is a giant myth. While the accent patterns have regional variations, if you intend to actually communicate in Japanese beyond ordering stuff at restaurants, you are going to sound very awkward if all your pitch accent patterns are wrong. There are many homophones only differentiated by pitch accent too, which can get really confusing. Not teaching pitch accent is one of the greatest failings of most Japanese courses and textbooks.
- howlgarnish 6y agoSure, it's a thing, but the average adult learner of Japanese, especially if monolingual English speaking, will have far greater trouble with vowels (short vs long), the "r" sound, glottal stops (especially ん), etc. By the time you've mastered all this, you'll also pick up the basics of pitch just from exposure. Japanese also abounds in perfect homonyms and context is almost always enough to distinguish "captain" from "enema".