Re: Beginner Question about Kana/Kanji/Romaji

Ben Finney wrote:
Walker Moore <walker.moore@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Anyway, a few episodes in...I appeared to be doing quite well, when
people began telling me what a mistake it was to "start out with"
Romaji. That I should study Kana & Kanji first.

I agree that learning Japanese via romaji is counterproductive in the
long run.

I do think you should be learning to read kana from the first
stages. I don't think the introduction of kanji needs to be
simultaneous; that is, I think not learning kanji is merely a delay,
rather than the absolute setback that comes from not learning kana
from the earliest stages.

In addition to the many reasons people have given *for* learning kana,
I think there's a good reason *against* learning romaji in the early
stages. The reason is that your brain, through your childhood language
learning, already "knows" how to pronounce those symbols, and this
will warp your pronunciation of Japanese if you read it using romaji.

Hi Ben, I think you've just managed to confirm what I was struggling to put into words in my other post. Learning new writing systems seemed like a tough, radical concept at first, but I think it's surprising how easy they are to pick up with the right material.

Kanji is much more extensive than Kana of course, but I refuse to be intimidated by it...yet. ;)


The kana, on the other hand, have no pre-existing sound association in
your mind, so you can learn the sounds without so much influence from
the sounds you learned for the latin alphabet. This benefit only
accrues if you actually do dissociate the kana from the romaji in the
early stages: by listening to a native speaker pronounce them (and,
ideally, correct your speech), *not* by looking at a romaji equivalent
in a table.

Note that this argument could be made for just about any language
(especially English!) that uses our alphabet to represent its sounds:
if you learn it after childhood, the existing sound associations you
have to the latin alphabet will strongly guide your pronunciation of
those characters, even when the language you're trying to learn has
quite different sounds.

I dare say it's easier to approach a language from a more childlike perspective if you're totally unacquainted with the writing systems involved. I certainly seemed to regress to a Sesame Street level of development the other day:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IWR1Ziynt8g

;)

The difference here is that Japanese comes to you with the benefit of
a totally discrete set of sound symbols: if you use them *instead* of
romaji to learn the sounds, you avoid the romaji trap and you at least
have a good shot at pronouncing the language correctly.

Thanks Ben. :)

--
Walker Moore
(-_-),,|,
.

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