Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaberdeen
Kind of - I meant if Romaji didn't exist at all, I don't think it would be possible for me to learn Japanese.
At least in my opinion anyway - Romaji's the key to learning how to pronounce (and some instances spell) japanese words correctly from an english speaking persons standpoint - without it you'd pretty much be looking at characters you have no idea how to pronounce.
|
I learnt Japanese hiragana and katakana without romaji at all. This is what you have classes in Japanese for, to learn how to pronounce. I think romaji can be a hindrance for pronouncing correctly as each english accent pronounces combinations of latin characters differently and to rely solely on these letters for pronunciation of japanese is not a good idea.
as MMM pointed out one time, he explained the character わ - wa as the first syllable in Washington. whereas in australian english we pronounce the wa in Washington more like 'wo'. I think MMM also explained か - ka as being like the first syllable in cotton. For australian english we pronounce the first syllable of cotton more like こ- ko in Japanese. So the accent of your english can result in quite different pronunciation of Japanese if you just use the romaji as a guide. I have met americans/australians who learnt pronunciation through romaji rather than from hearing and their Japanese is heavily accented because of this.
i only learnt romaji once i had to type on my computer. It was easier for me to learn romaji for text input of Japanese than to learn the japanese keyboard layout where each key represents a hiragana chraracter.