Re: Beginner Question about Kana/Kanji/Romaji

Ben Finney wrote:
[...]
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.

Absolutely! It is well known that no one who reads English as a native language is ever any good at French, German, Spanish, etc., but fairly easily learns to pronounce Russian Cyrillic like a native (we English speaker are of course more aware of the converse--French, Spanish, German speakers who never lose their accents because English is written with the same symbols, by and large, that their languages are written with)!

Bart
.

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