Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielSheen
If you expected every learner to just jump in and learn the kana before learning to speak the language, then a lot of people would stop learning. It doesn't take a week to learn to read. It takes a week to learn the strokes and have them memorized. I know all the hiragana and katakana, but when I pick up a piece of Japanese literature, I read extremely slow, and you have to sound out every bit. That’s because it takes a while to learn to read.
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You've basically made our argument for us. You get better at reading by reading, and to motivate people to read you need to tell them "if you want to learn more than 'hello'," you must know how to read."
If they quit, they never would have gotten skilled in the first place. Learning Japanese is
really, really hard. If they can't stick it out two weeks to learn kana, they won't stick it out anyway. I don't know anyone skilled in Japanese who didn't know how to read it within the first couple weeks of studies.
I knew hiragana before I knew anything but the basic greetings. I suspect MMM and Nyororin and delacroix are similar.
I've seen a lot of your site. Most of what is taught should be taught after kana. This is the way it is. To say otherwise is to disagree with PhDs from tons of countries whose field of study is Japanese pedagogy. Research supports what we say. Experience supports what we say.
You're not disagreeing with us. You're disagreeing with an army of educators and hundreds of years of experience. Heck, thousands of years of combined experience.
Regardless, I think things are getting out of hand. It's very silly to teach almost any vocab word in romaji because no one will need the romaji who ought to be learning the word. But we've already discussed that.
But I'm telling you: You are indefensibly wrong on the romaji issue. The facts are just not with you.
(Obviously there is an exception if you're teaching
survival Japanese to tourists.)