Quote:
Originally Posted by steven
I guess I can't express enough that I understand exactly what you're saying.
I deal with people struggling to read/write romaji all the time, trust me. I realize that when writing something in romaji it will take a few seconds to read it (and more for older people).
I agree with you guys very much... but I also kind of have to agree with what Ronin is saying to a degree. I would describe it as like a "sub-system". I'll be frank in that I'm not familiar with the alphabets use in other countries... but if every other country uses it in the same way that Japan does I'd be surprised. At any rate, I guess that's one of the reasons why they call English the "international language".
Honestly though, English is used on virtually EVERYTHING. If it weren't there on certain products I think something would almost feel odd... I think it'd be like missing punctuation or something to that degree.
And I'm also sure that most people I've talked to would probably fall under the "exception" category due to the fact that I'm a foreigner... in other words people who hang around me are probably going to be more sympathetic to these kinds of ideas.
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I see what you mean. I guess the question is how you'd have to define a "Japanese writing system".
obviously it's not originally Japanese
but neither is Kanji
the difference being the target audience, or intended audience
You mentioned how other countries use English, many countries do actually use English on a lot of products and signs and just as often misspell it using their languages phonetic version of it.
To me it doesn't feel special to Japan