> (Which is why romanization of Asian languages, for instance, is a trap for new learners: if you're learning Japanese, the latin alphabet should have no place whatsoever in your learning. It's a tempting, but false path)
I don't really believe this. Spanish, French, English, and Swahili are all written in the same alphabet, but have wildly different pronunciations. There's nothing magical about using Roman letters (and I have a chip on my shoulder about this after studying Japanese because, while converting Japanese to a romanized system has actual sound arguments against it, "it would sound like English" is trotted out constantly even though it's nonsense).
I disagree entirely. ローマ字 is a terrible trap for beginners and it does affect their pronunciation. It is why so many people struggle with the Japanese "r" and つ. It is why people pronounce "せんぱい" incorrectly. Do you see it romanized as "senpai" or "sempai"? Both of those differ greatly for beginners. It is why they learn 言う incorrectly. It is always romanized "iu" though it is pronounced "yuu" and unless you are told or are listening to how natives say it, you will learn it wrong.
Should ようこ be romanized as "yoko", "youko", or "yōko"? Would you read any of these differently from one another? The answer should be "yes" because よこ is not equivalent to ようこ but in some romanizations you will see them be equivalent.
It's a big wake up call when you visit Japan and realize you're completely illiterate outside of English signs (if you are in 京都 or 東京). If you did not study Kana you will not be able to read anything. My first recommendation for learners is to learn Kana and completely abandon romanizations entirely.
E: Speaking of 東京. Is it romanized "Tokyo" or "Toukyou"? Which of these do you think most people, including learners, see it as? Can you see how they end up pronouncing it incorrectly because of how it is romanized?
I don't think it's easier to learn that せんぱい is pronounced with an [m] sound than it is to learn that "senpai" is pronounced with an [m] sound. Beginners can be just as surprised by the different pronunciations of ん as they are by "n". The real difficulty is in internalizing the alien, regular phonological rules of Japanese. Likewise, people struggle with the Japanese "r" because it isn't a natural sound for them. Having the romanized spelling around just makes it easier to blame.
Long and short vowels must obviously be distinguished. I think either yōko or yooko are fine. Either Tōkyō or Tookyoo will let a beginner pronounce the word correctly. Some prefer youko and it works fine in almost all cases too, but perhaps there's no real value in clinging to the accidental way with which hiragana happens to represent long vowels; it isn't inherent to the language. Besides, there's a small added benefit in disambiguating real [ou] pronunciations like omou.
Your point about visiting Japan is well-put. There's no arguing with the fact that anyone who wishes to understand Japanese should learn kana and kanji. But I think that there's a real value in putting emphasis on the spoken language first, and a well-developed minority tradition of teaching Japanese like this in a serious manner, not as a crutch. E.g. Eleanor Jorden's JSL textbook follows this principle, as do a number of other textbooks and guides.
"To get started in learning to read modern Japanese along the correct lines, it is essential that first of all you have some knowledge of the modern spoken language. This is so important that it is well to emphasize it strongly from the beginning - contrary to what you may think, you undoubtedly will not make the best progress in learning to read Japanese by starting in your study of the language directly with reading and writing in the Japanese script. Some previous work with spoken Japanese is essential, and the better your grasp of the patterns and the forms of the spoken language, the faster and surer will be your progress with the reading materials in this book" (Roy Andrew Miller, _A Japanese Reader_).
Fair enough. I suppose the problem is less "being able to say some phrases in Japanese" and more with "actually understanding Japanese grammar". Perhaps a better example would have been trying to explain the topic particle 「は」. Try to explain how it is written "ha" but spoken "wa" without referencing the Kana. For learners who study Kana there is some slight confusion why it is read "wa" but they're able to quickly pick up on the distinction between "used in a word" and "used as a particle". They might read it as "ha" a few times but I've never experience someone showing difficulty with it. You can't even explain the concept in a meaningful way without kana.
But that is not currently the case in the most popular romanization method (Hepburn). 日本式 is the "better way" for learners but Hepburn is used for foreigners and learners because of how prevalent it is.
The two largest grammar guides that I see shared in /r/learnjapanese, and on the internet in general, are imabi.net and Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese. Both of which advocate studying Kana and abandoning ローマ字 ASAP. The first result for "learning japanese" is Tae Kim's guide and on one of the very first lessons it even opens with this comic [0].
I take the quote you quoted more as "Don't try to learn Japanese grammar by reading a Japanese grammar book" and less as "Don't try to learn Japanese grammar in English but explaining the fundamentals using Kana." It talks about all reading being in Kana/Kanji rather than just the important bits.
> Try to explain how it is written "ha" but spoken "wa" without referencing the Kana.
Unless your object is to learn writing, specifically, why is it important? It's like learning homophonous spellings in English -- it has no bearing whatever on the spoken language.
Tae Kim has put together a nice site but he's an amateur without much knowledge of linguistics.
I actually think this is because our opinions differ. I'm running under the assumption that "learning Japanese" involves all aspects, spoken and written. You're running under the assumption that "learning Japanese" involves only being able to speak the language.
You're correct. If someone's only goal is to learn to speak a language - then they don't need the writing system and can use romanizations with little issue. However, when (not if) they decide to learn the writing system they're shooting themselves in the foot and doing themselves a disservice. They may not decide to learn the written form for an entire decade, but if they ever live in a country where they need to use the language on a daily basis - the country isn't going to change all their signs to romanizations of the language just so they can find their way around town.
> I actually think this is because our opinions differ. I'm running under the assumption that "learning Japanese" involves all aspects, spoken and written. You're running under the assumption that "learning Japanese" involves only being able to speak the language.
You've rather misconstrued what I'm saying. I object, specifically, to the idea that the writing system determines pronunciation. It's also less than clear (it is contentious among educators, at any rate) that learning the writing system first is the best way to learn Japanese -- although, hey it worked for me.
If you want to argue that you have to learn the writing system that Japanese people use to read and write Japanese and hope to have people understand you, well, of course that's true, but it's so blindingly obvious I don't know why you feel the need to argue about it.
> the country isn't going to change all their signs to romanizations of the language just so they can find their way around town.
Probably a bad example since you have to go pretty damn far afield before the signs aren't all also in the Roman alphabet.
Also, nobody says "x-go ga sittemasu" to mean "I know such-and-such a language."
This is more eloquent than I was. I'd also add that my original argument was not about whether it's practical not to learn to write Japanese but about whether there is some intrinsic linguistic reason they couldn't adapt a romanized spelling reform if the will were there (I think it's totally clear there isn't)
I'll use Thai as an example because I speak/read/write Thai, but the following is also true for most other languages...
If you were raised speaking english, then the roman letters of the english alphabet have distinct pronounciations/sounds to you. They make these sounds in your head when you read them. Someone born in mexico will have a different alphabet, and heck even australians and British people have different sounds for their letters than Americans. Heck even Americans from different regions have different sounds.
The point is that Thai people make different noises when they speak. They do not have an "z" sound. Frankly, none of their sounds match up exactly to any of our sounds. When you spell thai words using the english alphabet, you will then tend to read the word back as you have written it, in English, and thus incorrectly. Thai letters have Thai sounds, so you should learn this second alphabet and then you can read thai words by making the correct thai sounds.
If a language has an official transliteration system, such as pinyin for Chinese, then it may possibly work, but you are still essentially learning a second alphabet, merely one with the same shaped letters. For languages like Thai though, there is no official transliteration, and making your own and using it consistently would be more difficult than simply learning the Thai alphabet, and infact would more or less require learning the Thai alphabet.
For an extreme example, consider that African language that has the clicky sounds. How would you even begin to remember how a word sounds if you were storing it in your brain as text after transliterating it into the English alphabet? "Click clack click clack" is not the correct pronunciation.
Edit: I re-read your comment and see that you speak Japanese. You are using roman-looking letters, but you are surely being very careful to read the letters using Japanese sounds. Given that an alphabet is a set of letters that represent phonemes, are you really using the English alphabet or have you created a second, phonetic Japanese alphabet that happens to have identical shapes?
But we don't make people ignore Latin alphabet when switching from English to German, Spanish, etc.
Why would this predisposition of seeing alphabet as connected to own sounds be worse with languages that don't use it natively?
If anything, English speakers have it easy - most English language has very loose connection between letters and sounds, i.e. most letters can be pronounced in wildly different ways depending on word or context. As such, English speakers should be used to constantly re-interpreting what a letter sequence sounds like - unlike those of us with phonetic language background, who are frankly constantly irked by English in this way ;)
I read and write Japanese in the same insanely complicated and only partially phonetic script as everyone else does (what choice do you have?) but that's not my point. French "R" and English "R" are totally different sounds, right? And in Spanish the same letter represents still a different sound, right? So how can anyone with a straight face claim that if you started writing Japanese with Roman letters everyone would develop an English accent? The claim is ridiculous on its face.
Japanese romanization is fairly standardized. Even if it weren't, creating in your mind a new alphabet for a new language using characters you already know isn't that much work compared to learning a new alphabet, and it's a good place to start learning a new language. Just don't use the crutch for too long and you'll be fine.
Having learned Japanese as a native French speaker, I can guarantee you that it's true.
When French people learn English, they often fall into the trap of pronouncing it in a French way: the way they read it instead of how they hear it. There are many elements in the accent of French speakers in English that come from this.
If you use romanisation of a language like Japanese, you expose yourself to the same problem instead of learning directly with the original script. In addition, the most common romanisation of Japanese is designed to be readable by European language speakers (Hepburn) rather than just using the roman alphabet in a logical, direct application of the native script (Kunrei).
Having learned Japanese as a native English speaker, I disagree.
> When French people learn English, they often fall into the trap of pronouncing it in a French way: the way they read it instead of how they hear it.
People learning any foreign language often "fall into the trap" of pronouncing it using phonemes and intonation that are more appropriate for their native languages and I sat through enough reading aloud sessions in college to assure you that somebody reading in the native script can still speak in an awful accent.
I'd also point out that my experience of taking a few semesters of Japanese was that it's pronunciation is very phonetical, at least compared to actual romance languages, which lends itself well to romanized representation. I actually found it easier than a course I started that purported to teach us to read French, but had no emphasis on the spoken language. I had no idea how the words were supposed to sound as I tried to read it, so I really struggled to read it. I dropped the course because the idea of learning a language without speaking it seemed stupid to me.
I would like to hear your arguments against romanization if you feel up for it.
Polish is a great example of this. It looks like someone just mashed on the keyboard. There is a Polish mma fighter named Joanna Jedrzejczyk and no one has any clue how to say her last name.
I don't really believe this. Spanish, French, English, and Swahili are all written in the same alphabet, but have wildly different pronunciations. There's nothing magical about using Roman letters (and I have a chip on my shoulder about this after studying Japanese because, while converting Japanese to a romanized system has actual sound arguments against it, "it would sound like English" is trotted out constantly even though it's nonsense).