I’m not saying no “dabblers” read up on Japanese at all, but grammar learning sites? I don’t know.
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I think the idea, from a creator’s point of view, is they want to make the whole site look more beginner-friendly, even if you don’t expect people to stick to romaji forever. So dabblers who get curious about something can stumble upon it and not be intimidated. If it’s all in hiragana, the dabbler never even gets it in their search results.
Just my guess.
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There is always the English translation. The explanations are also in English. I don’t see the point of indexing romaji Japanese in search engines.
You don’t think there are people googling things like “iku kuru grammar” or whatever?
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I’m in this comment and I don’t like it
But I mostly do that because it’s faster for me to try the romaji on my work computer, which takes way too long to process the change from English to Japanese, then from romaji to kana, and then to actually let me scroll through kanji and whatnot
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You are probably right. I didn’t think of this type of query. I had in mind searching romaji example sentences.
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That’s a likely reason, or at least an understandable one. But if so, she may need shooting herself in the foot by making the website cater to both dabblers (adding romaji) and advanced learners (grammar and nuance points).
Dabblers wouldn’t stick around much to study nuance and grammar points, and advanced learners would be put off by the romaji. If she zero’d in on advanced content, I’m sure more advanced learners would recommend her website to each other.
Makes me wonder about her reasons for sure, perhaps this is indeed the best format for her. I wonder if somebody has contacted her to ask about it-- my Japanese definitely isn’t good enough to do that 
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Actually, as someone who very frequently tries to type explanations containing hiragana forms and kanji forms on WaniKani (not to say no one else does, but this is personal experience), I think I understand why she uses so much romaji, as opposed to using hiragana/furigana for readings. First of all, when typing explanations, I need to constantly switch back and forth between my Japanese IME and my English keyboard. My computer often lags in the process, resulting in the first letters I type after switching turning into letters/romaji instead of hiragana. Next, when I type hiragana in order to provide pronunciation guides in my explanations, the Japanese IME will try to adapt to me, and will constantly propose the kanji that I’ve typed before with that combination of hiragana. It’s extremely annoying to have to use the arrow keys or the mouse to force my IME to give me the hiragana version (which often requires some special arrow key sequence to get to – it’s as though the pure kana version of kanji are locked by default), and it burns a huge amount of time. (Never mind the fact that in order to type furigana on WK or just in HTML in general, we need to use the ruby syntax. I’ve gotten much better at it over time, but it’s still time-consuming.) I think this is the practical reason that Maggie Sensei uses romaji: it allows her to work linearly, at the least for each line of her lessons. She types in Japanese, then switches to her English keyboard for romaji, and finally types the English translations.
Secondly, beginner-friendliness aside, I think that her use of romaji is fairly logical – at the least, I find it acceptable. Perhaps this will be an unpopular opinion, but here's why: all phonetic guides, romaji or kana, are essentially a crutch for us (or young Japanese people) to learn to read Japanese.
Everyday Japanese is a chimera of kanji, hiragana and katakana. Anyone who can read Maggie Sensei’s example sentences without using the romaji probably already knows how to read kana (hiragana, at the very least, since katakana is a bit rarer and so may be forgotten from time to time). Also, it doesn’t matter how we learn the pronunciation of a kanji, as long as we know how to correctly translate the phonetic guide into sounds. If we’ve already learnt kana, then we’ll know how to translate the romaji into furigana in case we ever need to indicate the pronunciation for someone else. Ultimately, however, for us as learners, even furigana is a crutch. All that matters is that the combination of sounds sticks in our heads. Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that almost all of us type Japanese words using romaji-based IMEs on our computers. (Phones are another matter – I use 100% kana on my phone.) The reason is simply that most of us don’t have the time to learn another keyboard layout. Has that implicit reliance on romaji harmed any of us? I think not. Japanese people probably type fluently in romaji as well. Ultimately, what I’m saying is this: hiragana transcriptions are simply another crutch, albeit one that’s in between romaji and everyday Japanese in terms of ‘Japanese-ness’. It’s just as bad to rely on furigana as it is to rely on romaji, provided one has made or is making the effort to learn kana, because in the ‘wild’, none but the rarest kanji have furigana on them. Our job is to lock the various readings of a kanji into our heads, and not to encode them as romaji or furigana forever.
I think Maggie Sensei’s assumption is that anyone who’s searching about grammar has either already learnt kana or is in the process of learning it, and that even if someone goes on her site as a ‘romaji Japanese learner’, that person can learn to associate kana and kanji with their pronunciation via the romaji (provided that person can be bothered to make the effort). In any case, her site is about grammar and common expressions, not kana, so I don’t see any conflict in terms of her mission/purpose as a teacher.
Finally, on a personal note, I think I'm a fairly 'advanced' learner – at the very least, I can read kana quite comfortably, even if I'm not always fast enough to understand on-screen flashes of katakana in anime – and I dare say I actually appreciate the romaji.
An endless string of hiragana would be ridiculously hard to read (that’s part of why Japanese uses a mixed kanji-kana script today), and would also likely be unnecessarily long, particularly if spaces were added to ensure that words are easily distinguishable. I would need to somehow hunt down the string of kana corresponding to the kanji whose reading I had forgotten, read it, and then get the reading into my head. With romaji, everything is compact, with clear spacing, and I can easily find whatever I’ve forgotten/don’t know in the phonetic guide, and since – let’s be honest, this is true for almost every foreign learner – romaji is more intuitive to process, I can rapidly pick up and memorise the reading before moving on, without having to worry that I missed a kana somewhere because the phonetic transcription was a long, messy string of characters.
To sum up, it’s far more convenient (and efficient) for her to use romaji, particularly if she wants to transcribe entire example sentences, and it honestly shouldn’t do advanced learners any harm. Then again, it could be that I started Japanese with a textbook that contained a lot of romaji and phonetic transcriptions at first, which probably taught me to filter these things out mentally where necessary. However, another way of looking at it is this: if we’re so against phonetic crutches, then shouldn’t we just search for the explanations in Japanese? Being ‘advanced’ should mean we’ll be able to wade through all that, and there won’t be any irritating phonetic crutches anywhere to help us with readings. We’ll just have to get our dictionaries out.
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Oh, tell me about it. Sometimes, if I haven’t rebooted Firefox in a while, I have to wait upwards of a minute for it to switch to the IME.
Well, that shouldn’t be happening until you tell it to convert. If it is converting right off the bat, though, you can generally get the hiragana back by pushing F6.
Well, that’s where the logic breaks down a bit. It’s one thing to not want to put up with the IME’s quirks when you’re trying to write in a forum. It’s a whole different matter when you’re writing a website that’s intended to teach Japanese to learners.
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Eh, I don’t really see why that needs to be the case. Once you can read kana romaji becomes more painful to read, so it’s not like it’s detrimental to your learning or anything. Perhaps there’s a short transition phase where you’re still more comfortable with romaji (if you even started out using it), but I’d imagine that’s an extremely small subset of learners at any one time.
I think Japanese learners are a bit snobby about romaji, to be totally honest. Lots of good resources get overlooked just because they dared to include romaji.
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They have an example sentence just for such an occasion:
Ex. 最初、マギー先生は人間なのかと思った。
= I thought Maggie Sensei was a human being at first.
=)
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It could just be that I don’t know how to use my IME efficiently, because it’s the default that came with my Mac. Perhaps there is some means of locking kanji conversion out. (EDIT: found out how to do it. I need three keys to do it on my Mac, so it’s not worth the effort.) However, even then… I’d like to say that on the contrary, I think it makes even more sense for Maggie Sensei, as a teacher, to want to use romaji, given what her lessons contain. From a lesson/explanation creator’s perspective, anything that slows the lesson creation process or makes it more frustrating without significantly contributing to students’ learning is a waste of time, or at the least very taxing. I think her lessons contain 20 example sentences on average. Needing to lock and unlock conversions for each and every one of those sentences is going to be really annoying, not counting potential typos that will require correction and burn even more time. More importantly, as I said earlier
- Japanese uses the mixed kanji-kana system for the sake of readability. A full kana transcription would be extremely difficult to read because it would be hard to know where words stop and end, and it would also take up a lot of space on the page, possibly stretching over two lines (while the original sentence covers less than one). Even if that makes it sound like I have inferior kana reading abilities, I’d just like to point out that no one does this in real life. I think even for Japanese children who know no kanji, the only reason sentences can be written in pure kana without causing frustration is because they’re simple and short.
- Anyone reading her example sentences while genuinely seeking progress in Japanese needs at least kana knowledge, unless of course they aren’t serious enough about Japanese to learn kana. As such, the phonetic transcription will always be an assistive crutch, and nothing more. I personally don’t see the difference between using romaji and hiragana for that purpose, provided the learners who consult her site are already making an effort to learn to read kana and kanji. I think that’s a reasonable assumption for her to make, because her site does not exist to teach reading, but rather to teach grammar and expressions. Plus, when I see the verb 訪れる and say おとずれる, I don’t see romaji or kana in my head. I hear the sound in my mind and feel my mouth opening into that rounded O shape. It ultimately doesn’t matter how I learnt the pronunciation, as long as I remember it (and can read kana, which I’ve already learnt).
Ultimately though, I guess it depends on her target audience and how much effort she’s willing to put into the transcription based on her objectives. Perhaps it’s like what many other people have said: she’s just making sure her site is accessible to everyone, and that it doesn’t make Japanese seem more difficult than it actually is or needs to be. Some people may prefer to avoid romaji like the plague, and I can understand that, but perhaps she doesn’t only want to cater to those who can already read kana (and possibly kanji).
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Even the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar uses romaji alongside kanji example sentences. The focus of grammar is the grammar, not the kanji/kana. If you know the kanji/kana, then great, if not, also fine, here is some new grammar to learn!
If you are someone who can handle learning kana and kanji, all the while also progressing with grammar, that’s nice. I know plenty of people who have a hard time wrapping their brain around new concepts, and would only be held back even more, if they also had to think about every single kanji. This is why Minna no Nihongo also has a romaji version of their most basic textbook, though they expect you do kanji with furigana after that.
Then you have the other end of the spectrum, who wants Japanese textbooks to be as Japanese as possible, and remove all of the furigana in their books.
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Yeah, Victor has been living in Japan for many years (and teaches Japanese), so I don’t doubt for a second that he can absolutely utilize feminine Japanese for the sake of maintaining a website from the point of a female dog.
It’s not uncommon for men in Japan to play female roles in a number of platforms btw. Video games or anime conventions, for example. To me, this isn’t a strange thing (but only because it’s in Japan, lol). 
As a purist, I just want the right information out there. Which is why I make sure to clarify the identity of the website’s owner/writer.
Hope this helps! 
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I wonder if he’s changed his main role on the site as of lately. In his older videos that I remember watching, I recall him mentioning writing lessons and maintaining the website.
In any case, Maggie was definitely his dog and she has since passed away. Here’s an emotional goodbye video to Maggie that her owner, Victor, made back in 2014. Maggie hasn’t been with us for quite some time now… 
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I was expecting to read comments about the quality of the lessons and the information rather than the appearance of the website 
…putting aside the appearance, i think it is a great website, i really like the examples that she gives you, they are sentences that you could hear in regular conversations.
Maybe it is just me but the site looks like those old japanese websites with flashy colors (maybe?)
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Uh, I’m not aware of exactly how widespread it is, but I do know the Twitter persona of the author of Overlord is a… 10? (my memory of the age is flakey)-year-old girl. The language use isn’t particularly feminine though. I’ve also seen an anime running on otaku stereotypes that involved the protagonist’s very effeminate brother drawing and selling doujinshi, and his language use was hilarious. It’s not the idea of a man taking on a feminine persona that surprises me, because I know it happens – I just think it’s hard to imitate the other sex without sounding stereotypical.
Even if his Japanese is that good (it could well be since I have the impression he’s been in Japan for around 10 years now, if not more, and I don’t doubt his learning ability), that doesn’t explain the grammatical errors and unnatural sentences. It takes a lot of experience to be able to recreate the habits of a foreign user of your native language: you need to know incorrect grammar as a system. (And I grew up in an Asian country in which everyday conversation is conducted in a form of broken English with its own unique grammar, so I would know. Recreating those mistakes requires understanding why people make them.) Even if that’s for the sake of keeping up appearances, it’s counterproductive for the purpose of teaching, since a lot of people write to Maggie Sensei in perfectly good English – more natural, clear explanations would be helpful, and it’s often quite obvious that Maggie Sensei isn’t able to go into the sort of detail certain followers are asking for, even if her explanations are still helpful. She often uses examples even when followers are asking for general principles.
Finally, Maggie Sensei’s Twitter account says the two people who will be tweeting are ‘me and Yukari’, and I’ve seen a few other things on Twitter that make me think Yukari is running it, the slightly unnatural English aside:
- I’ve seen a photo of a birthday cake that Yukari received from a fan/thankful follower being posted there. I believe Victor is married to Tomoko (did I get that wrong? Because that’s what another YouTuber said when addressing a video to him that congratulated them on the birth of another child), so it would be quite strange if he had access to Yukari’s private life as well.
- Maggie Sensei speaks Portuguese. She uses it in some of her Tweets. As far as I know, Victor doesn’t. (He didn’t while analysing a viral video in 2015 anyway.)
Besides this, it would be weird if Yukari had just ‘disappeared’ at some point, given that all the Maggie Sensei pages (including the ABC English site) mention her as part of the origin story. Plus, Victor’s Japanese for Morons teaching style is really different from Maggie Sensei’s style, and I honestly think that it’s very hard to coordinate two Twitter accounts and a YouTube channel filled with detailed videos, especially since both Twitter accounts seem to Tweet almost daily. (Maggie Sensei’s account gets a lot of questions, as you might imagine.)
Update: I’m scrolling through his Twitter page now looking for information on NHK’s caricatural summary of the protests in the US, and I just saw this tweet:
It would be just… you know… weird if he thanked himself for proofreading, especially since he could just keep quiet about it.
Either way, I really appreciate your efforts, and thanks to you, I now know about Victor’s channels. It was an interesting investigation, and I fully understand the desire for the right information to be out there, even when it’s not strictly important to what people are doing. It’s a matter of principle. 
(I didn’t mean that in a moral sense. More of… personal values and preferences?) However, all I’m saying is that my experience with Maggie Sensei + the explicit statements on the website and on Twitter seem to suggest that someone other than Victor writes the lessons. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s involved in the web development or in writing a few of the lessons, but like @Radish8 says, he doesn’t seem to be the main author.
EDIT: Apologies to all for how off-topic this is.
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Good info. Hideous pages.
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Want to add to what xplo said.
First I reacted to her page as if it is some cringe website. Then I stumbled upon her pages in search for grammar explanations more and more. Later I realized I am fully dependent on her. Her explanations are very thorough and if something is missed, usually it resurfaces in comments after an article itself. But what lacks is representation. Yes, of couse, amount of work done in each article by her or her guys is quite enormous, yet visual part is horrendous for my eyes and I can’t get used to it. Also romaji make me angry.
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I heard Donald Trump is building his own Japanese language learning site. It’s called MAGA Sensei.
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