Romaji vs Normal way to write japanese

[sodapple]

I have been thinking about this: When the people speak japanese is obviously you aren't looking not even one kanji, you are only listening words. So with the romaji happens the same, right? you see the sounds, not kanjis not hiragana not katakana, then I think there is no problem if never I write in the normal way, of course I think if I wanna understand japanese texts I have to learn kanjis, hiragana and katakan but if I want to understand in a fast way in my original alphabet there is not problem, right?

I would like to know your opinion. Thanks!!

[the_haunted_boy]

If you want to read Japanese it is ideal to learn how to read the Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji, Romaji does not go that far.

[Javizy]

Romaji might seem nice in Beginner example sentences, but when you're trying to read a passage of complex sentences it's horrible. Romaji looks as messy as pure kana to me, I hate the stuff. The best use of romaji is to make learning kana easy, beyond that it's just a crutch for lazy, shortsighted learners who believe attaining to be a fluent-speaking illiterate is an effective way to learn a language.

Here's a few reasons why romaji should go in the trash can after you've memorised kana:

- Romaji isn't used in Japan beyond giving tourists directions to the crapper and for the occasional company/product name. You're more likely to see misspelt grammatically incorrect English than you are romanised Japanese.

- Learning Kanji is an excellent way to develop vocabulary. Remembering a character can help you remember several associated words, and in the case of prefixes and suffixes, instantly add an extra dimension to your vocab. Remembering a reading can also help you recognise certain meanings in spoken Japanese. This is why I said romaji is horrible to read; when you know the kanji they actually make things a lot easier.

- As you progress, you're going to need more and more complicated resources to learn from. Outside of jpod, you'll be hard-pressed to find romanised text; a lot of intermediate materials aimed at learners have a minimum amount of English, let alone romaji. When you reach an advanced level, you're going to want to study from things aimed at Japanese people. Films and TV are all well and good for listening comprehension, but reading is always going to be more effective for grammar and vocabulary. Essentially, as an illiterate you're going to hit a major wall at this stage.

- You can learn a lot about Japanese culture through reading manga, books, newspapers, websites, e-mailing Japanese friends, etc. Ignoring kanji is like putting up a nice big barrier between yourself and a near infinite amount of culture and language learning resources.

- It's rewarding to see your hard work pay off when you can sit down and read through something aimed at Japanese people, when as a beginner it seemed impossible and even offputting. Also, I'm sure you'd be a bit uneasy about putting 'fluent in Japanese' on your CV when you can't even read a children's book.

You've done the sensible thing and asked a question though, so don't take this as a rant directed at you, but rather as some advice to stop you from making a mistake you may regret more and more as you progress with Japanese. Whatever you decide, happy learning and good luck

[Belton]

with some caveats, yes you're right.
It's just a writing system; a set of symbols to represent sounds.
(if you want you could use $%&* to represent them but then only you could understand them.)

You'd have to be careful not to also start using the sounds that normally go with those letters. Once most texts for westerners more or less ignored kana and kanji as being too hard. There is a slight case for knowing kana and how origana works as it helps verb and adjective inflection.

However,
eventually knowing only romaji will limit you as you won't be able to use written sources to help your spoken Japanese improve. Also if you ever get to Japan being almost completely illiterate can be a big culture shock. Written communication with Japanese might also be difficult.
A piece of text without kanji is a bit difficult to read, to understand and to differentiate amongst the many homonyms. Japanese can read romaji but use it in a slightly different way to how it's taught in the West in my experience. Even all kana is difficult for Japanese to read.

kana is pretty simple I'd at least recommend you try to learn it. katakana is actually very useful in Japan, you get a lot of return for relatively little effort.

kanji, well it can be done if you want and the sooner you start the sooner you'll master them. (I'm sure someone will recommend Heisig to you at some stage (^^) )

[Jake_Lucas]

I can't really speak from experiance since i am only a begginer with Japanese language, but i would have thought it would be best to learn the kana and kanji even if you didn't want to read Japanese texts, like books and magazines etc.

Since in my opinion it would help you think in Japanese, I'm finding it hard to explain my point but try thinking of it the other way around.
If you were Japanese and you were learning how to speak English i doubt you would learn using the kana that you grew up with, since English uses single letters rather than the phonetic sounds that make up kana, but instead you would learn the roman alphabet to better understand the language you are studying.

Also from what i have seen of Romaji alot of words can be spelled incorrectly etc. which could lead to bad habits in the future should you want to learn kana/kanji.

Also, in my opinion it would be better to learn as you did with your native language.
First you learn to speak and say simple words, then you learn your alphabet, and then you use that foundation of words you know and the alphabet to learn how to spell the words.

I hope i'm making sense here, i managed to slightly confuse myself while writing this lol.

[jkeyz15]

I HATE reading all romaji or kana. It's a lot more difficult, and according to my Japanese friends, they feel the same way.

[kc8ufv]

You'd have to be careful not to also start using the sounds that normally go with those letters.

Exactly why the English word karaoke, and the Japanese word カラオケ sound very different, yet are typed the same way (assuming you are using romaji input). When you write it in romaji, and start using English pronunciation rules　(This happens very easily for English speakers, I know I have done this), you will end up with something that sounds closer to ケリオキ.

[Psy]

While I agree (as usual) with the consensus here about encouraging literacy, I think the main point sodapple was making has been overlooked:

I have been thinking about this: When the people speak japanese is obviously you aren't looking not even one kanji, you are only listening words. So with the romaji happens the same, right? you see the sounds, not kanjis not hiragana not katakana, then I think there is no problem if never I write in the normal way, of course I think if I wanna understand japanese texts I have to learn kanjis, hiragana and katakan but if I want to understand in a fast way in my original alphabet there is not problem, right?

He's making the point that you don't need to know a single kanji to understand and speak the language. This is completely true, in that Japanese children are speaking and understanding the language well before they can read advanced texts. Language at its heart is comprised of sounds, not letters. However, it is misleading to say (and I can speak not only from observation but from experience here) that kanji are not visualized to some extent during the thought process and when speaking. This parallels to how, in English, you can view (or hear) a nonsense word like unrealisticificationalism and still extract a clear meaning out of it. The word roots and conjugations are all in your head, which you use in your everyday language without being acutely aware of it. The same is true in Japanese, and while word-roots and derivations exist perfectly well without the need of characters, the kanji culture and its pervasiveness in the Japanese society builds strong connections between these roots and the characters themselves. Let's take the word denwa for example, spelled 電話 or "electric-conversation," meaning telephone. Let's also assume for a moment that you don't know the word dennou. By virtue of the fact that you know 電話, one can automatically field a guess that the den in dennou might have something to do with electronics, which, of course, it does, as it is the Chinese word for "computer" and is used for "cyber" in Japanese.

Native speakers of Japanese use these exact same connections when reading texts and learning new vocabulary. While again, this could be done with only sound and a normal phonetic alphabet, the use of characters is emphasized to such an extent in the society that one not only knows a word root but also associates that root with a given character. This is advantageous as well because it helps to distinguish the high number of homophonous word roots.

That is what my experience so far has taught me, anyway. I'm open to debate if anyone cares to elaborate more on the topic.

[DaemonForce]

I have a bit of a learning problem with most lessons. When I hear a new word being introduced I think of it being spelled in romaji when given at normal speed. Sure I make a point to read only the kana/kanji portion of the lessons but I still think in Latin characters when I have nothing but the audio. I guess it's a side effect of growing up with English for 21 years? I'm thinking I can make this pass by doing kana drills as often as possible but what's the point if I'm still thinking of the sounds in English characters as I type?

As far as Kanji goes:
Hate it.

Still need it.

I use Heisig's method to study but I don't give as much attention to the mnemonic part of structuring the characters. I try understanding it by looking at the familiar characters given and try beating the English meaning into my mind. Which just so happens to be a downside since I'm looking at more English. Sure it's a lot of work(for those of you without a DS/Google) to open up a dictionary and look up the English meaning, but at least the appropriate reading gets hammered in nicely. This is a disaster when I see a kanji early on with 8+ English meanings. Today I must have done something somewhat right. I walked into a *$ a few hours ago and spent an entire hour focusing on the meanings of 30 kanji. I wonder how long it's going to be before I forget one or two of them...

The meanings of some kanji escape me. There's this weird portion of them that just don't make any sense to me. Such as the ones that mean "olden times" or "new babe"...It's an old thing that has legs? Someone seriously help me with that one. It's worse than the guy that heard a dog bark and wrote it as "bow wow" in English.

It just gets weird. The most disturbing one I've studied today was the one for "employee." Now don't get me wrong but I'm starting to believe that Japanese culture is naturally cruel. I mean I look at the thing, there's a mouth. Then there's a seashell...It's not even upright. It's just a 「かい」 with a mouth above it which probably represents the seashell as a person. But oh wait I'm forgetting it has a mouth above it...I just don't see it.

I need to make some more flashcards and edit them to give me a generic stand-alone kana reading only. Either that or I'll just get frustrated and buy the flashcard set after seeing the 40th kanji that has 17 meanings/spellings to it alone.

A.D.D. GO HERE:
Get rid of the English babble. The Latin garbage is ruining the review portion of the learning process. Save yourself the headache and just buy the flashcards from this site. Problem solved. I see myself doing this by maybe the end of this week.

Do your best.

[Javizy]

I have an image of the grandad from Hey Arnold hunched over a walking stick for 'olden times', and a baby in a nappy crawling around his legs and tripping him up for 'newborn babe'. For 'employee', I just have an image of a bunch of office workers with oyster style shells clamped to their mouths, although I usually use Dr Zoidberg for 'shell'.

I find that TV/movie/etc characters pop into my head quicker and work their way into more complicated kanji more easily, especially for the more abstract keywords. Like for the radical 'state of mind' I thought of someone meditating and that led to Dhalsihm (add correct spelling where appropriate ) from Streetfighter.

[ThisistheHenry]

I think that even for just speaking the language, using Romaji is a bad idea.
I do realize that Japanese children obviously learn to speak the language before they can read it; however, you will still be reading the language using an alphabet that you know, and will probably lead to bad habits. Romaji also often times uses short cuts (like making "ei" into "e" with a macron) that leaves out subtle parts of pronounciation.
Even if you never plan to have to read Japanese, I'd recommend either leaning kana (kanji isn't necessay in the sense that you mean) or just not reading at all. And, of those two options, learning kana isn't very hard (though it may take a while to get up to speed) and I doubt that you'd ever regret putting the time into it.

[untmdsprt]

Here's a good reason to learn kanji: train station names! Most are always written in their kanji form with no romaji underneath. If a Japanese friend wants me to visit them, I always request they send me the kanji of their train station so I can find it. This not only helps me learn more written Japanese, but also how to pronounce it so when I do get lost, I can ask.

Another reason to learn all kana is a majority of the products here either have hiragana or katakana written on them. My reading of katakana has improved also because of the need for shampoo, soap, cleaners, etc.

Although I'm a visual learner, my listening skills are improving each day. It's hard to ignore the high pitched squeals of women in the department stores, and other sound effects you get in elevators, etc.

[sashimidimsum7250]

Maybe it's just me, but I tend to find it harder to read Japanese with no Kanji at all. If you quickly scan the Kanji, you can get a good idea about what's being talked about. That's something you'll miss with just romaji or kana.