Quote:
Originally Posted by Koir
Just a question: if romaji is such a horrible, horrible, world-destroying blight on existence, why does it still exist? As a whipping post for advanced Japanese-speaking students?
Bear in mind this is coming from a person who can't read Japanese at all anyway, so that snide castoff response won't work.
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It exists to enable English (and I'm guessing other languages) can have Japanese loan-words like Karate, Sushi etc.
It should not be used as a medium to learn a language such as Japanese that does not use Roman characters as the pronounciation and spellings of words will only confuse others when they come to more advanced levels.
Take the word Tokyo, as a fine example. Romaji users will see it in their Japanese text books as Tokyo ni ikimasu. (actually cringed when writing that) but the kana for it is toukiyou.. See where I'm coming from? A person then going to learn kana will try to write ときょ (tokyo) thinking they've written the city when its really just gibberish.
Equally, they will come to read toukiyou in kana (とうきょう) and think "WTF is that?".
I've also seen Ro-maji text books use English phonetics to make Japanese words (Japanese for Dummies is a good one for this)
"Tokyo nee ee-kee-ma-soo"
Nuff said.
な～さん、 いい署名だな～
