Quote:
Originally Posted by steven
My point was that Japanese are using the romaji to read the signs.
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Find a sign that lacks the romaji. Point this out to those around you.
I think you`ll find that you`re the only one who noticed, or if someone else noticed it was because something seemed "off" but they couldn`t pinpoint what.
Japanese simply don`t read the romaji on signs regualrly. I`ve been in situations where there has been a weird place name written in kanji with the romaji above it... And still seen people puzzle and puzzle over how to read it. I`m pretty certain that those who DO read the romaji are clear exceptions.
Including something as another writing system and simply having knowledge of a system are quite different. Romaji is introduced in school first as part of English learning as a way to figure out how to write your name, not as another facet of Japanese.
Write something (other than a name or single word) in
Japanese in romaji, and see how long it takes for someone to figure out what it says. If romaji was truly another writing system of Japanese, that wouldn`t be the case.
I think it`s really hard to make this clear for speakers of European languages, as the majority of commonly learned and used "foreign" languages use the same roman alphabet as the native language. But for Japanese learners, most of the foreign languages commonly learned use a writing system that is NOT native to them. Before starting to learn another language, they need to learn the writing system... Learners native in a European language have the tendency to just convert the foreign sounds into their own alphabet - Japanese learn in the writing system native to the language.
If we are to consider romaji as another writing system of Japanese, we will most likely have to consider it another writing system for most languages that don`t use it natively. The prevalence of English has made it valuable enough that there are few countries where it is not encountered regularly and children do not learn it at some stage.