They do teach romaji in 3rd grade here too, but it’s more so of a recognition so that they can type things. I have yet to see them encourage the kids to write in romaji, but I also don’t go to 国語 classes here as I’m always a full 6 classes on days that I go to Elementary school. plus romaji doesn’t include all 26 letters of the alphabet
What does that mean? What letters are excluded? Those that you don’t need to type in Japanese like Q or W?
Yeah, there are a bunch, like C, V, and L, that would never appear in romaji.
You use w but not v, q, x, c, l.
I think those 5 are it though
Nani? Akarimasen, yo.
Oh right, わ and を use W, obviously.
That makes me think that I discovered recently that in Portuguese schools they don’t initially teach K, W or Y because they’re not normally used to spell Portuguese. Or at least that was true a few decades ago when the millennials I was discussing with went to school, I wonder if it changed now that English loanwords are so omnipresent.
Do they teach romaji for ヴ?
That character doesn’t appear in the Wikipedia article about kunrei-shiki romanization at the very least.
I haven’t looked into it more than that.
Its name is rendered Kunreisiki rômazi in the system itself.
The Japanese people passive-aggressively discouraging the Latin spelling of the Japanese language by standardizing on the worst romanization scheme ever conceived.
To be fair, it prioritizes consistency of producing the characters. The た行 characters all start with “t”, etc.
It’s their prerogative to not prioritize English pronunciation, despite what some bloggers here might say.
It seems like it’s not just WaniKani bloggers agreeing:
In January 2024, the Cultural Affairs Agency proposed revising the 1954 Cabinet Order to make Hepburn the standard romanization system of Japan.
I still can’t call anything the “worst” if MojoPriest would hate it.
Today I learnt from reading the general “romanisation of Japanese” article, or more likely re-learnt because I expect I’ve read it before but forgot about it, that Nihon-shiki wasn’t intended so much as a romanisation method but rather a complete replacement of all existing Japanese writing systems.
Was… was MojoPriest involved in that?
They’re already updating the romanisation on place name signs to use Hepburn.
(The upcoming volume of Yuru Camp has a running joke about the confusion of “Gunma” versus “Gumma” to romanise 群馬県. Not quite sure of the exact specifics, because I only glanced over it on Comc Fuz, and haven’t read it in detail.)