I think that as long as young people do heavy chatting on keitai, they will keep coming up with new abbreviations. It's just physically much faster to type 「あのＫＯマジＫＹ」 than to type　「あのクサイおやじ、マジで空気が読めない」. They should ban keitai in Japan or our language will be destroyed!

I remember during the "poke-bell" boom of the mid-90s, young people could "read numbers" into messages. Once keitais came around, that skill lost any need to exist, so I am sure the next generation will have something else...but I do agree with you.

It takes me a LOT longer to punch out KO and KY than just the regular Japanese. :D
I take forever to type anything using the alphabet, but am very fast with Japanese. I don`t think it`s so much speed as the "coolness" factor of using an abbreviation code.

We have a magazine with a huge list of ギャル語 abbreviations, and there is no way they can remember them all. Some had 5 or 6 meanings - it seemed more like a code to make it hard for others to understand what was written.

Your right (MMM) - I got confused regarding Romaji - I instantly thought kpauner was refering to using english words mixed with japanese script - which of course is very rare. I have seen lots of instances where romaji has been used in conjunction with the other 3 - apologies for misinforming you (Kpauner).

However - in relation to your retort regarding Romaji's relationship to foreigners(MMM)

My post was NOT regarding Romaji's use to benefit foreigners - I highlighted it's "convenience" at being phonetically identical to the structure of Hiragana and Katakana and by proxy - it's benefit to westerners as a translation tool.

I did not and have not insisted that it was developed to help foreigners, but you can judge yourself how difficult it would be to translate japanese script without using romaji as a translation tool.

To me & I daresay to you (MMM), that benefits foreigners immensly. (If the foreigner wants to learn japanese)

I'm very sorry as to me I use also keitai and I also shorten my words when I text my girlfriend in 東kyou :p

I am sorry I misread your post, Gaberdeen.

I am not sure what you mean by "using romaji as a translation tool". If you mean we use a QWERTY keyboard to type Japanese, then, yes, the ABCs are essential for inputing Japanese. But I don't think that's what you meant...

Kind of - I meant if Romaji didn't exist at all, I don't think it would be possible for me to learn Japanese.

At least in my opinion anyway - Romaji's the key to learning how to pronounce (and some instances spell) japanese words correctly from an english speaking persons standpoint - without it you'd pretty much be looking at characters you have no idea how to pronounce.

I learnt Japanese hiragana and katakana without romaji at all. This is what you have classes in Japanese for, to learn how to pronounce. I think romaji can be a hindrance for pronouncing correctly as each english accent pronounces combinations of latin characters differently and to rely solely on these letters for pronunciation of japanese is not a good idea.

as MMM pointed out one time, he explained the character わ - wa as the first syllable in Washington. whereas in australian english we pronounce the wa in Washington more like 'wo'. I think MMM also explained か - ka as being like the first syllable in cotton. For australian english we pronounce the first syllable of cotton more like こ- ko in Japanese. So the accent of your english can result in quite different pronunciation of Japanese if you just use the romaji as a guide. I have met americans/australians who learnt pronunciation through romaji rather than from hearing and their Japanese is heavily accented because of this.

i only learnt romaji once i had to type on my computer. It was easier for me to learn romaji for text input of Japanese than to learn the japanese keyboard layout where each key represents a hiragana chraracter.

I have to agree with this. The way I was taught was to learn hiragana as fast as possible so that we didn't count on the English alphabet to learn pronunciation. It helps when learning the rhythm of the language.

ら sounds nothing like RA in any language.