Quote:
Originally Posted by anrakushi
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.
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I have to agree with this. The way I was taught was to learn hiragana as fast as possible so that we didn't count on the English alphabet to learn pronunciation. It helps when learning the rhythm of the language.
ら sounds nothing like RA in any language.