[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by biocit

No one is born to be passionate about something--Something HAS to click. Learning romaji is not something that hinders someone from achieving an end result. Like I said, not everyone learns the same way. While it may be traditional to learn the kanas first, it does not mean it's the only way. There's no study saying that learning a language through romanized lettering causes someone to never learn that language. Some people will prefer to use romaji in the beginning and some will immediately learn the kanas. Like I said on numerous occasions, this is just for the beginning.

But what your teaching is not "beginning" stuff. Comparisons is not a "beginning" concept.

You can read a lot of books on ancient languages and most of the books will be "user friendly". Unless it's extremely specialized, the book will always have the romanized system instead of the original alphabet. Is this holding hands? I think it's getting that person to be interested to learn the original alphabet fully.

I read a book on Egyptian hieroglyphics and thought it was very interesting. If the book used just hieroglyphs to talk about Egyptian etymology I would be very turned off by the fact that I can't understand it.

This is a failed analogy. You're not teaching etymology. You're teaching language usage.

What I'm trying to say is that I am trying to get the reader interested in learning Japanese, and I am not trying to cram their heads with information which will ultimately benefit the user or have them lose interest.

You're not trying to get a reader interested in Japanese. If they're on your site, they're already interested in learning Japanese. You don't have to convince them. They're already convinced!

If you portray that "it's OK not to learn kana right away," then yes, you are hindering their progress. For example, no native speaker here will help you if you cannot use kana. So that's a hindrance for sure.

Dude, EVERYONE comes to Japanese wanting to "learn that cool writing."

If you avoid using kana to avoid turning people off, then they will get turned off when you do start using it. Thus these people will have wasted their time with a language they had no intent of actually studying through. In other words, yes, they will have been hurt.

Edit I think this conversation is getting out of hand. At first, we were all just "Hey, you really should use kana." But now your excuses for not getting it are getting more and more preposterous, so the tone of the conversation is switching.

You should by all means teach Japanese to others if you are qualified. But you should not make excuses about holding an intellectually lazy person's hand in the hopes that they somehow gain the ability to speak Japanese.

You are making a site that purports to teach Japanese. You should act like it. Right now, you're writing the web page equivalent of Making Out in Japanese.