spoken japanese vs romaji

[sodapple]

konnichiwa mina-san!!

I think that sometimes to read only romaji could help to practice spoken japanese, the problem that i found sometimes with the normal writen japanese is that you can see always the kanjis, and this help you but, when you want to listen japanese you can't see them and there is a lot of words with a pronuntiation so similar. any piece of advice? and of course I say this because I see a lot of anime and dramas in japanese and after is hard to find the correct words in a dictionary.

mata ne!! gambare!!

[Javizy]

I'm not following you too well... do you mean you have difficulty looking up words that you hear because you don't know the kanji for them? Otherwise I don't understand. If you read kanji, you're still learning how to pronounce the words, with the added bonus of being able to associate sounds with meanings, so you can begin to take an educated guess at which characters make up the unknown words you hear. It also makes retaining vocabulary easier when you can break down words in this way.

Wasting time on romaji only takes time away from learning kanji and will ultimately delay literacy. I don't really see a single benefit of romaji outside of providing an easy system to learn kana.

[jkeyz15]

Yo!
English. Do you speak it?

[sodapple]

well... actually, I don't speak english (totemo, totemo muzukashii desu), I learned english watching movies, reading books (in english of course) and playing video games. so now I can read and write more or less, and when I listen it I can understand it buuuuuuuuuuut... with the jpanese is a totally diferent story, I understand the structure of the language, the problem it has so many similar words. supose you listen a phrase and they use for example ikitai this word of course without looking wrinting has two different meanings "I want to live" and "I want to go" of course it depends too on the context but what I want you see is the lot of words so similar, how to choose the right meaning while you listen, who knows may be they are talking somenthing different of what you think... Ah! and i only can speak spanish and japanese, because it's more or less the same pronuntiation. ganbareeeee! mata ne!!!

[kc8ufv]

sodappleさんの英語はいいです。

Every time I look at Japanese printed in romaji, I tend to start mispronouncing it. That's why I hate trying to use romaji to learn Japanese.

[Javizy]

I'm guessing most languages have a lot of these words, English definitely does. The context will make it easy the majority of the time. All you can do is learn the words the best you can, and eventually you'll be so used to them it'll be obvious, like it is for native speakers.

[sTeVe aUsTiN]

Studying Japanese with romaji is lazy way to do it.

It sounds like you are really interested in Japanese, so I agree with Javizy on this one. It's not easy, but you gotta study Kanji.

Just think of it this way....
Romaji is NOT Japanese. Japanese people don't use it.

As Yuki-san says, がんばってくだせぇ！

[markystar]

がんばってくだせぇ！

that quote just made my day!

[Joey]

Romaji is NOT Japanese. Japanese people don't use it.

Just was thinking about this, don't you have to use romaji everytime you type on the keyboard? At least, I've never seen a purely hiragana/katakana keyboard.

[sTeVe aUsTiN]

Hmmmm.
Good point.

But then again, even though you're using romaji for input, the output is probably not romaji

[kc8ufv]

Romaji is NOT Japanese. Japanese people don't use it.

Just was thinking about this, don't you have to use romaji everytime you type on the keyboard? At least, I've never seen a purely hiragana/katakana keyboard.

I don't use ローマジ to type 日本語. That's what Kana input is for. To type 「ローマジ」　in kana input you type {`_jd[} and 「日本語」 is {i-yb[ } on a US qwerty keyboard. Makes perfect sense if you get the labels. (only a couple bucks on eBay)

[markystar]

i have a japanese computer and i always use the romaji input and not kana.

i asked the japanese people around the office and everyone here uses romaji input ("it's easier" they said.)

[Fedgrub]

Romaji is NOT Japanese. Japanese people don't use it.

Just was thinking about this, don't you have to use romaji everytime you type on the keyboard? At least, I've never seen a purely hiragana/katakana keyboard.

I agree with this, however I also believe that romaji makes people lazy. Romaji is too easy, I don't believe you could ever fully comprehend and use hiragana and/or katakana if you build your knowledge on the use of romaji. If you do, it would just be too easy to say "I'll just write the romaji".

[Joey]

yeah, i think that also - for english natives the roman alphabet is just too strongly assosiated with english and english pronounciation for one to successfully use with japanese pronounciation and meaning.

just wanted to point out that as with most everything, even romaji has its own time and place

[kc8ufv]

The strange thing is when I look at Latin, I have no problem altering my pronunciation to fit the language. However, since romaji isn't the "correct" writing system for Japanese, my mind doesn't like changing my pronunciation to fit it. I have actually read Japanese printed in romaji in a manga, and it was tricky. (It was a Korean manga, translated to English. There were several passages in Japanese (all had translations to English, but I blocked those out). The title was "Hanami - International Love Story", the male lead was Joonho, the female lead was Hanami. Hanami is Japanese, and throughout most of the first volume, Joonho is verbally assaulted by Hanami's sisters, who forget they are in Korea, and most people can't understand them.

Edit: Now that I think about it, I am getting used to reading Latin in katakana. Maybe I've been reading 魔法先生ネギま！ a bit too much lately.