Stay away from rōmaji! · 2006-04-08 12:56 by Damian
This is such an important topic that I think it warrants a post on its own. As a beginner of Japanese, your first issues will be with the writing systems. Most people relate Japanese to “thousands of characters”, which of course is true when referring to kanji, but they don’t know about hiragana or katakana. Since hiragana and katakana only have 46 basic characters each, it is in fact not very difficult at all to learn at least those very quickly.
Despite the fact that kana aren’t that difficult, the marketplace is ripe with textbooks and dictionaries that use rōmaji (the way of writing Japanese with roman characters) almost exclusively. Worthless! Those textbooks will go through a lot of grammar and vocabulary, while keeping your true reading skills below that of Japanese first-grader! Doing rōmaji will at most spare you a few weeks of dedicated studying, but if you are at all serious about Japanese you will want to stay away from anything with rōmaji. You want all the proper reading practice you can get.
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