Quote:
Originally Posted by filiadragongurl
I really can't agree with you there. In college, I was taught using Professor Jordan and Mari Noda's "Japanese: The Spoken Language" which was written entirely using romaji... of course we learned our written Japanese from the same authors' "Japanese: The Written Language". And students from our school were known to speak Japanese much better than those who used books like Genki. I will admit that I'm not very good at writing because of it, but I have to say that it taught us grammer well and it was only because our classes weren't focused on writing that I ended up not being good at writing.
In any case, I just don't think blanket statements like that are accurate. I'll just assume you were talking about the phrase books that don't teach you much of anything... >.>
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I guess I should rephrase: be extremely wary of a course that uses solely romaji for more than a couple weeks. After that, you're preventing yourself from attaining a better grasp of the written language by still relying on romaji.
I can equally provide anecdotes that students at my school, where romaji was stricken from the classroom after the first week, frequently tested much higher than students at other schools when we went abroad. And we tested into higher level classes largely because our grasp of the written language was so much greater as to be equivalent many of the Chinese who had gone to study in Japan as well.
Of the thirty students while I was there, only four tested into level five (out of six, where level six was reserved for completely fluent students), and two of those four were from my university. That was, incidentally, 100% of the students from my university.
In any case, my point is that it's a waste of time to use romaji once you can write/read kana, and a book that forces you to keep using romaji is retarding your progress. I hope we can at least agree on that much.
Yes, I shouldn't have made such a blanket statement.
And, for the benefit of
ThaDuke, romaji is Roman characters (A-Z).