spoken japanese vs romaji

[Sean]

You'll have the same trouble of identical words with romaji that you will with kana/kanji, but I think (and as others have said) the benefits of going with kana/kanji as soon as and as much as possible outweigh anything you could get from using romaji.

[sodapple]

Now that i see all these answers I see that although romaji in its essence it's not japanese, i think that foreings could help sometimes, and like i see in the keyboards could be very difficult don't write whitout romaji, and in japan they use it to help foreigns to read in some places. so I think romaji although romaji is NOT Japanese it could be usefull sometimes. mata ne!!

[Fedgrub]

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

Yeah, I mean, you are going to need romaji to start learning your first characters. I think anyone saying that they never used romaji is a liar (not that I am pointing fingers in here, Im just saying people who study in general). Its only human nature to immediately associate the sound with the letters. I guess thats all part of fluency. But I think as Sean said, you gotta break the habit eventually and the sooner the better.

[johnpa]

I imagine the best way to learn spoken Japanese is to listen and repeat...If you have a strong auditory memory.
I'm one of those people that needs to associate sounds with written symbols in order to memorize words. In this respect, hiragana is extremely useful.
When I see a text block of romaji, I see a lot of o's, a's and u's that are easy to mix up. It's more convenient to see consonants paired up with vowels — in a single symbol. This way I have a clearer visual image in my mind.

[Yoshiko]

For me it 's the same, johnpa-san. I have to see the words in order to memorize them. I got quickly used to reading hiragana. When i read romaji now, I get really confused. Like 'Toukyou'. It's annoying.　Anyway, my lessons in Japanese are given in English, the textbooks are English, the teachers speak English, but my native language is Dutch (and the university is.) So hiragana is just more convenient regarding pronounciation. I also think that by using the romaji system that is based on english pronounciation would move Dutch students a step away from Japanese pronounciation. Except for 'r'/'l' you can find it all in Dutch. I guess in Dutch the pronouciation of 'Toukyou' would be 'Tookjoo'. (LOL it looks like a tourist's guide japanese...)

[Mican]

I'm curious..How long did it take for you more fluent people to automatically visualize spoken Japanese as kanji/hiragana/katakana instead of romaji? In fact, do you even visualize Japanese speech anymore?

[Psy]

That kind of thing is difficult to quantify, Mican, because it's such a gradual process-- a lot of subtle things happen all the time (somehow you caught a word or phrase that you didn't notice before), rather than one large thing happening at a moment (went from zero to full comprehension of a scientific journal). The more you read Japanese in its native style the less you think in terms of roman letters. For me, I can't really tell you when I went from having to look at a character and think about its sound, to being able to hear it in my head as a reflex... but how did I do it? I practiced a lot. Give it a few months of daily practice and you'll find yourself doing the same!

As for visualizing Japanese speech, I'd say once words have settled into your active vocabulary you'll end up visualizing them about as much as you visualize your native language. For unfamiliar or newly learned words, I tend to trigger them in my head by either visualizing the kanji or by association with other words.

I don't want to give the wrong impression, though-- I'm by no means fluent. I've merely advanced in certain areas to the point where I'm no longer a beginner.

[Psy]

Yeah, don't fret too much this early into your study. Getting comfortable with kana first will really help prepare you for the learning of the kanji which, sadly, in order to be truly competent in Japanese you will have to approach at some point. The earlier the better, but definitely master the kana first.