Don’t Take The Romaji Short-Cut When Learning Japanese
Posted: Thursday, June 30, 2005
by Stephen Munday
Car Auctions In Japan
This is an issue many Japanese learners come up against, particularly if they live outside Japan. After all, If you are not in the country, it seems difficult to justify the huge amount of time that learning Japanese characters seems to require.
So what are the problems in using Romaji (Roman letters, like the characters you are reading right now) for studying Japanese:
The associations your brain will create between Japanese words written in Romaji and English words (or those of your mother tongue) greatly increases the risk of mispronunciation. Japanese symbols will have none of these associations for you. The very fact that they are completely alien helps you to start your language learning experience from a blank sheet. Your chances of being able to gain the correct pronunciation soar.
2. Show Me The Romaji
Your textbook may be in Romaji, but you will be very hard-pressed to find any real examples in Japan. Of course, you can see a fair amount of reasonably understandable English, but not Romaji. And watch what happens when write some Japanese in Romaji and show it to your native speaker friend: They have a really hard time deciphering it, because Japanese people just don’t it.
3. Today’s Crutch Becomes Tomorrow’s Burden
If you decide to continue your studies in Japanese, you will eventually need to start to grapple with the characters themselves anyway. In my opinion, it is harder to leave the crutch of Romaji behind than it is to bite the character bullet at the beginning of your studies.
As you can see, there are serious problems with using Romaji when you start to learn Japanese. So what is my advice to learners? Well, it really depends on your motivation and needs:
1. The Serious Student
This could be a person who is going to be living in Japan for a period of time, whether as a teacher or a businessperson, or someone who travels regularly to Japan for meetings.
If you are in this group, you should first master hiragana and katakana before you even start with any other aspect of the language. Then, when you do begin, you can dive right into a "proper" Japanese textbook.
Hiragana and katakana are not at all difficult to learn. I learned them part-time in a couple of weeks. Even kanji can be learned fairly rapidly by a motivated and well-organized student with the right tools.
2. The Hobbyist
Perhaps you don’t have a burning need to learn Japanese. You are doing it for pleasure, or because you are planning on visiting Japan.
If this is you, then your options are more varied. However, even in your situation, I would not suggest starting with a Romaji textbook. Instead, I would recommend you begin with the spoken language. If you are wondering how you can do this if you are not in Japan, check out the Pimsleur method. Sure, it is a little expensive even second-hand. The point is that you will be able to speak and understand enough for a short trip. Once you have completed the course, you can then decide whether you wish to stop there, or continue studying in a more serious manner - in which case you then follow the Serious Student method I mentioned before.
Learning to speak and listen will keep your language-learning fun, whilst not undermining any future serious study by getting you used to the Romaji crutch.
So whatever your motivations are and whatever your needs, if you can avoid the Romaji crutch, you will pick up the language better and be well-placed to make rapid progress in the future.
About the Author
Stephen Munday co-owns a Japanese company called Integrity Exports which buys vehicles from car auctions in Japan for used car dealers around the world.
Permission is given to reproduce this article in whole with the URLs correctly hyperlinked.
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Top-level comments on this article: (6 total)Yes you are right. But since im just trying to learn japanese for my own personal pleasure, I think im just going to stick to learning it the romaji way first. Thats how i learned hundreds of japanese songs by heart. hehe ^-^ so to me if your learning the language just for yourself (and to show it off to others that have no understanding at all for the language),then the romaji way is the way for you. Otherwise, you should learn hiragana and katakana first.
I agree that someone in your position can choose to do this. But what if you decide to pursue Japanese further in the future? You should also not overlook the fact that by looking at the words through the lens of Romaji, your mind will instinctively start to view the language in terms of English pronunciation, which would not happen if you use hiragana and katakana.Hiragana and katakana are so easy that there is really no problem learning them. Kanji take a lot longer, but I got both of these character sets in a couple of weeks while working full time, so it is not that hard. And what better to impress your friends than by showing them how you can read the strange squiggles as well!Learning hiragana and katakana is indeed easy, but the assumption that using romaji will make you use english pronunciation is wrong. You should know this if you speak several european languages. Learning to pronunce roman letters in the correct way of the language you are studying is very easy, and doesn't require that you know the language at all. It would take no more than a couple of days of intense study to be able to correctly pronounce the written language of several european languages i.e. german, english, spanish, french. Japanese romaji is no different. Reading phonetic alphabets is one of the best and easiest tools for learning a new language.Luckily hiragana and katakana are also phonetic alphabets, which is also way they are so easy to learn ;)I'm afraid that as a Japanese student / speaker and former long-term TEFL teacher, the fact is that L1 interference is a very real problem when learning any language, including Japanese.The advantage of avoiding Romaji and starting straight from hiragana and katakana is that you start absolutely fresh - associating new sounds with new symbols - which does not negate, but at least minimizes the L1 interference risk. Personally, I am not aware of anyone I know who is fluent in Japanese who did not jump quickly into hiragana and katakana. And to be honest, they are so easy to learn that there is little excuse for not doing so.
Very helpful, i wasn't sure whether to choose one or the other whilst learning with Rosetta Stone, i guess i'll stick with katakana and hiragana =]
Exactly! Plus, things start to get hairy later if you use romaji. Example. What is the difference between itte and itte. One means to go and one means to say. If you can't read ???and ???then you will have.... how should I put it.... a very interesting learning experience. Good luck to all you romaji learners!
I spent a few days learning hiragana and katakana and I want to continue to learn japanese without romaji....but my textbook uses 90% romaji. I am also having troubles finding textbooks that don't use romaji. If anyone knows a good book to learn japanese when you can read hiragana/katakana please post something.
I partially agree with you, Steven. It's true that interference with L1 occurs when learning to read any language, but learning kana first does not solve the problem, and you know why? Because I don't know anyone who started learning hiragana without the help of romaji, so for example there are very few people who correctly pronounce ? before a vowel or a glide, because in their mind ?=N, they just make an equation of each kana with the romaji counterpart.
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