Re: Common phrases not usually found in textbooks - yatte kuru


I agree with you, I don't really understand why people feel a need to begin learning Japanese using kana and kanji. It's either a kind of masochism or elitism I think, besides which many beginners are not ever going to need to advance very far in the language, so it makes more sense to learn in an easy way.

I couldn't disagree more. Latin letters are a crutch to be thrown away as soon as possible. The hiragana can be mastered in a week, a month at most.

Well, exactly: if you have to spend a week or a month studying before you can even read the textbook it's a bit silly.

Sure, but a textbook that persists in using romaji beyond that initial week or month period is also silly (in my opinion of course). It's like a textbook for Japanese learners who don't really want to learn Japanese.

I guess there's always the Japanese Conversation for Dummies book, whose title alone guarantees a specific demographic among its buyership.


And as an intermediate learner, I highly regret not having learned more kanji at the early stages. It's really forced me to put more interesting aspects of the language on hold while I get caught up in my kanji. After all, a typical intermediate language learner makes tremendous progress through copious reading, and that's just not possible if you've learned Japanese with the attitude that writing can come later.

Well, this seems like rather a contorted argument to me. I don't really see the need to study in the order "kana and kanji before speaking", and I don't see how it would really make any difference in the total amount of time you spend on learning whether you learn kanji and kana at the beginning of your studies or not.

Perhaps it's just a matter of learning styles, but I'm trying to cram learning 1000+ kanji into the course of about 8 months so I can read more books without looking something up every sentence. I think my capacity to recall kanji would be better if I'd learned more of them gradually from the beginning instead of concentrating on them at this (relatively) late stage.

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