I have been learning Japanese and have reached WK level 51 (outside WaniKani but I am a lifetime subscriber to WK) and have already passed N3 exam and going for N2 this December.
As you know there is this thing called Romaji and I can swear, a lot of Japanese learners have an existential crisis when they see Romaji anywhere in their study materials. I had to admit I was in that boat for a while.
But recently I have started to learn Chinese and it seems Pinyin which is kinda based on Latin alphabet is a big deal in Chinese to the degree even Chinese students apparently use it. That made me to question the aversion for Romaji.
So my question: Where does this fear of Romaji stem from? Does it hold any merit?
You can certainly learn the language with romaji, especially if you donāt care about reading and writing. It was the standard approach for a very long time, up until perhaps the 1980s, and it had some advocates even after that (eg the authors of Japanese: The Spoken Language) because it lets you get on with mastering pronunciation and grammar without getting tripped up by the writing system.
But I think for most students of Japanese now romaji are considered unnecessary at best, because hiragana really arenāt that difficult to learn to read and write. This is where Japanese has an advantage over Chinese: it has its own sound based system which is a workable fallback when you donāt know the kanji yet and which can be used to annotate the pronunciation. Chinese traditionally didnāt have anything like that, which is why pinyin is useful to fill that gap.
I absolutely agree - but I would also mention that early in my Japanese learning adventure I ran across Japanese-English dictionaries that were clearly intended for use by native Japanese speakers, that are organized alphabetically and looked up via romaji, for ease of use, since the latin characters have an āalphabetical orderā which the J syllabaries may not (at least J-E IIRC - but maybe some of them were both J-E and E-J? - Iām sure that I could dig up several of those from my personal library, but it might take a bit of time because I have over 1,000 Japanese or āJapanese-adjacentā books such as textbooks, etc. and they are not yet properly organized).
Back then I was confused as to who would be the āaudienceā for dictionaries with lookup via romaji, not understanding the utility of ordering Japanese words in āalphabetical orderā via romaji latin characters even for native Japanese speakers.
So, while Iām trying to wean myself from using romaji, there are times when I find it useful - including when I want to jot something down quickly, because, face it, Iām lazy.
Iām not sure what you have in mind here - the syllabaries have not one but two standard orders (the modern äŗåé³ order and the traditional ćććÆ order). Both have been used for dictionaries.
I said āmay notā rather than ādo notā to allow for the use of syllabary-based collating orders as an alternative to the romaji/latin orderings.
However I donāt believe that I have any such dictionaries in my personal library, and I have no information, anecdotal or otherwise, related to the popularity of such dictionaries (I think that there is a topic somewhere in this forum devoted to native dictionaries, which I donāt have immediately at hand, and which I have only skimmed in the past - it would be interesting to see links to such alternative dictionaries, and perhaps that would be a good place for me to look). I will also have to look for some of my own romaji-ordered dictionaries.
That has no unique difficulty stemming from romaji though. Hiragana and katakana arenāt gonna be any easier. Itās more of an example of why Kanji is helpful.
You mean, everything was written in latin letters?
Where they published in the 1965-1985 maybe?
During those years there existed a technical gap, where it was possible to benefit of the ease of computerization for an affordable price, but only limited to basic Latin alphabet.
Nowadays it is equally cheap and easier to create a sorted index in ććććć order (with all the special rules for dakuten, small size, etc) than latin alphabet (and it also avoids the trouble of having to choose between Ć“ and oo or ou, which donāt sort the same at all).
I have a åä»č¾å ø, printed (with lead characters) in France, that for some words resorted to simplified chinese characters (I mean, the same character changed of type near the end of the page, as if not enough types were available, and they resorted to their variant stock)
( And also a couple of the classical lead type misprints: one type being put upside down)
I agree that knowing the Kanji is the way to go. I have difficulty to identify the words when they write them in hiragana only for the words that have Kanji writing as the most common form.
And I feel sad for ditching so many potential good resources in the past just because they included a bit of Romaji. I was under the spell of irrational Romaji aversion that I got from the community. Seems it is wearing off finally.
Thanks everyone for your contribution to the discussion.
