Quote:
Originally Posted by Ronin4hire
A friendly debate with a classmate which I thought might be of interest to some people on here.
The 26 letter alphabet and arabic numerals being the fourth.
He said that it doesn't count because it's not "Japanese"
My argument is that neither is Kanji. And the increasing use of the alphabet and especially arabic numerals in Japanese means it should be included (though of course we don't need to familiarise ourselves with it as we already are).
What do you think?
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I wouldn't have even bothered replying if this question had come from someone that I knew has never even seriously studied Japanese, but since it's from you, here's my two cents.
It's 3. If I attended kindergarten through university in Japan and still said it was 4, I would be a moron. Japanese is officially written vertically. How does Roman alphabet even fit into that?
Where do you see this "increasing use of the alphabet" that you speak of? I've been living in Japan over 50 years and I can't say that is what I've been witnessing. I don't ever see Roman alphabet being used for communication among Japanese. It may be used for very limited purposes as in train station names for foreign tourists and product or store names for "design or aesthetic" purposes rather than communication purposes.
Are you aware that though you might see signs like SONY, TOYOTA, etc, in Japan, those aren't their official company names? Official business names are ALWAYS registered using the three writing systems, and so are people's names.
My point is that nothing important is ever written in romaji unlike some members here still sadly and ignorantly seem to believe (OP not included). You can live your life, as many older Japanese people actually do, with no problems in Japan without being able to tell A from B.
If this is how someone like myself, who reads and writes a few European languages feels, other Japanese, who are mostly monolingual as you well know, would probably be astounded by a notion that we might have 4. They'd go, "What's the fourth one? Am I illiterate for knowing only three?"