Re: Beginner Question about Kana/Kanji/Romaji

Bart Mathias <mathias@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

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)!

What a pretty straw man you erect. I especially like the entirely
fabricated absolutes in the argument.

Like any straw man argument though, it's not the position I expressed.

--
\ Eccles: "I just saw the Earth through the clouds!" Lew: "Did |
`\ it look round?" Eccles: "Yes, but I don't think it saw me." |
_o__) -- The Goon Show, _Wings Over Dagenham_ |
Ben Finney
.

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