Romaji (also sometimes called Romanji) is the writing of Japanese words in Roman script, i.e., the same script as English, Spanish, French, German and so on. You already know plenty of examples of romaji, words like "ninja", "dojo", "sushi". In these examples, romaji is necessary because Japanese words are being borrowed into English. In a very real sense, "ninja" is not a Japanese word but an English word. The Japanese version is 忍者 (if you have Japanese fonts). The English word is etymologically related to the Japanese word but they're not the same words.
Knowing the English word is useful for learning Japanese because it gives you a "free" Japanese vocabulary word. (For some other examples of "free" Japanese vocabulary, check out my article, Japanese Vocabulary You Already Know.) For these English borrow words, it's natural and right to use romaji to write the English words. (And for the Japanese words, kanji should be used.)
Unfortunately, a lot of textbook writers use romaji for everything. As a result, a lot of textbooks allegedly about Japanese, are actually about some strange artificial language, "Romaji Japanese", which noone in the world actually uses. Studying Romaji Japanese is useless, time-wasting, and it isn't even any easier than real Japanese. Textbook authors who write so-called "Japanese" textbooks in Romaji are peddling junk. University departments who choose to use those textbooks are abusing their position of authority and misleading students. Of course, the departments aren't doing this deliberately, they're just acting from the best knowledge they have, which unfortunately is very flawed.
THE MISCONCEPTION: KANJI IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR NON-ASIANS??
There's an idea flying around that Chinese characters are just too hard for non-Asians to learn. As if having slightly darker skin magically makes a person better able to read the characters. There are two reasons for the difficulty of kanji.
First, there's the intimidation factor. In Western culture, we're taught from childhood that Chinese characters are some evil contraption of Satan. We've all heard the twisted horror stories of Chinese children taking ten years to learn to read a newspaper; hey, when was the last time you saw a nine-year-old of any culture reading a newspaper??
Second, there's the obsolete teaching factor. The Chinese characters are flush with logical structure, but this is generally ignored in kanji pedagogy. The traditional, mainstream method to learn a kanji is to repeat it many, many times, brute-forcing it into memory. This works for Japanese and Chinese children, because they have over a decade for it to work, and that's a decade where their full time job is to go to school. Adult language learners don't have a fraction of that much time to invest in learning.
Fortunately, there's an easier way to learn the kanji. In a sentence, use the kanji's built-in structure. When kanji C is made by squishing kanji A and kanji B together side-by-side, it's madness to teach kanji C before teaching kanji A and B, and yet that's just what classes often due, just because kanji C might happen to be used more frequently. (A moot point since you need to learn all three eventually) This no-brainer technique has been organized by James Heisig in his Remembering The Kanji book, which also uses some cutting edge visual memory techniques. Click that link to read my review of the book. People routinely learn all ~2000 "necessary" (Joyo) kanji in a year with Heisig, and some have reported doing it in six months.
BUT I WANNA START PRONOUNCING JAPANESE RIGHT NOW!!
One of the big arguments for romaji is that it allows students to start pronouncing Japanese right away. Fortunately, Japanese has a pair of alphabets (well, technically syllabaries). These alphabets are called "hiragana" and "katakana" and they allow Japanese words to be rendered phonetically.
A Japanese word will be made up of kana (hiragana or katakana), kanji (Chinese characters), or some mixture of both. The kana part, you can be reading almost right away. The readings of the kana are extremely regular, with so few irregularities you can count them on one hand with fingers to spare. For the kanji part, there's "furigana", which is where you write tiny kana above the kanji. With furigana, students can start pronouncing kanji in Japanese 101.
Of course, when kana is used instead of romaji, students must learn to read the kana. This does add a little time before the students can start reading Japanese, but they're gonna need to learn to read kana eventually anyway. May as well get it over with!
What's more, Romaji doesn't even capture the Japanese perfectly. There are some sounds in Japanese which don't exist in English, and their transliterated romaji bastardations are just very rough approximations. The most famous example is the Japanese alveolar tap, a mix between R and L and D which is usually written with an "R" in romaji. (Yep, even the word "romaji" itself, is not pronounced like it's written in romaji. The first sound in "romaji" is the Japanese alveolar tap.)
So even with romaji, an otherwise untrained student can't start pronouncing Japanese properly yet. It takes a lot of exposure to the language to master the few sounds Japanese has which English doesn't have. I was studying, with lots of exposure, for years before I even realized I was butchering the Japanese "n". (Actually, it was on my second date ever with my girlfriend, that she taught me about the truth of the Japanese "n". I didn't get comfortable with it until I studied nasal vowels in general when I did a 30-day French Language Blitz.)
KANJI IS EASIER THAN ROMAJI
There's a reason that the oldest language system in history, Chinese, uses Chinese characters instead of an alphabet. Contrary to racist Western misconceptions, Chinese characters are the most advanced writing system.
Compare these two alternatives and consider which one is wiser:
1. You study an alphabet for one month and master it, and then spend 80 years reading things at a speed of 5 Metric Readtimes.
2. You study Chinese characters for five years and master the important ones, and then spend 75 years reading things at a speed of 25 Metric Readtimes.
Obviously it's better to invest a little more in school and read much faster your entire life.
Biased western scholars argue that alphabets are more advanced because "there're less of them thar symbol thingies to larn!" However, if we followed this reasoning to its logical extreme, then the most advanced writing system would be binary, with just two letters, say "1" and "0". That works fine for computers, but try devising a reasonable human writing system like that. Or we could take it even further and use a 1-letter tally mark system! "X" means "yes", "XX" means "no", "XXX" means "me", "XXXX" means "you".. and you don't wanna see the spelling for "superconductor"!
One of the huge advantages of kanji is that the "letters" (or symbols) that "spell" a word also contribute meaning to the word. Thus, by the time you're an intermediate student, you can deduce the meaning of words you've never seen before, just by how they're "spelled"! This aspect of Japanese is totally lost when the language is transliterated ("transbutcherated" would be a better word) into Roman script.
LEARNING VOCABULARY
When we read fluently, we rarely fixate on individual letters or characters, no matter which writing system we're using. Instead, we memorize the general appearance of the words. If you're a native speaker of English, you never stop reading to spell out the word "the".
Part of learning to read fluently is the process of memorizing the shapes of the common words. This isn't something you wanna specifically drill (it'll be drilled automatically as you drill the higher level parts of the language, like sentences), but you want to always be exposed to the shapes of the words, so that you'll gradually become familiar with them in a natural way.
In a traditional Japanese course, it's typical for the students to see almost no Japanese words written in real Japanese for the entire first year. That means they're throwing away that entire year, memorizing the shapes of the romaji bastardizations of Japanese words. As if they were studying to travel to Romajiland, some non-existant country where everything was written in Romanized Japanese.
And then when they get past the intro year sequence, they have to memorize the Japanese shapes of all those romanized words anyway. So they gained nothing. They may as well have converted the Japanese into freakin' Arabic script and memorized that. Heck, at least then, they'd've learned something about Arabic!
JAPANESE HOMONYMS
The dis-ambiguating effect of kanji, together with the relatively limited phonetic inventory in Japanese, has led to a language chock-full of homonyms. Some words have TONS of homonyms. Just as an example, I did a search for words which Romanize to "sensei". In addition to the usual meaning of "teacher, doctor, karate master" we're all familiar with, the following words also Romanize to "sensei" (and in Japanese they're all spelt differently):
1. head-start (baseball jargon)
2. despotism, autocracy
3. oath, abjuration, pledge
4. ancient sage; specifically, Confucius
5. recessiveness
6. astrology (prefix only)
7. affidavit (prefix only)
If you were learning Japanese using nothing but Roman letters, you'd think these 8 words/prefixes were just one single word with 8 different totally unrelated meanings!
LEARNING HOW TO LEARN JAPANESE
Another good thing about Kanji is that it teaches the student how to really learn Japanese in general. If all you know is romanized Japanese, then you'd better pray the word you're looking for is in a romaji dictionary. Such dictionaries do exist, but they are utterly inadequate to learn the language.
If the student ever hopes to become fluent in Japanese, she'll eventually have to reach a point where she's picking up new vocabulary outside the classroom and outside the romanized textbook. That means she's gonna have to start picking it up from real, flesh-and-blood, Japanese-in-the-wild. If she's been using roman transliteration as a crutch throughout her classes, she'll be starting over from 101 when she gets to this point.
ROMANJI VS. KATAKANA
Japanese students of English have a similar problem in intro courses. As insane as it is, a lot of Japanese ESL material attempts to convert English into katakana, the Japanese syllabary for foreign borrow words. This has all the problems I've already described for when we do it, plus the fact that English phonetics are far richer than Japanese. To put it in a sentence, katakana-ized English leads to a lot of Japanese people utterly, mercilessly failing at English-- without even knowing it.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH KANJI VS. ROMAJI
When I first started studying Japanese, it was purely self-study (I pride myself on being a life-long autodidact). Initially, I had no clue what to do. I started with the about.com material on Japanese grammar, which is in Romaji. I thought, "Chinese characters are crazy.. who wants to put in that much work to learn them.. I'll just learn spoken Japanese and be content with that."
I was having a lot of difficulty learning just very basic stuff- the colors (what's all this nonsense about adjective colors vs. noun colors??), family members, verb conjugations. Of course now I understand why it was so hard-- I wasn't studying Japanese, I was studying a bastardized Romananese which was Japanese minus the writing system specifically tailor made for Japanese, which writing system was replaced by one intended for the families of language as far removed from Japanese as possible!
Eventually, I stumbled onto Tae Kim's Japanese Guide To Japanese Grammar, the premier free online Japanese Grammar textbook. Tae Kim is an advocate of kanji-from-day-1. I was a skeptic and didn't wanna take him at his word, but when I started going through his textbook, I was very quickly converted to kanji.
Fast foward. As a math PhD student specializing in mathematical logic, my mathematical interests are becoming more and more specialized and focused, which means each quarter, fewer and fewer of the math courses at my dept. are applicable to me. At the same time, I'm required to take 9 credits each quarter because I'm a TA with full tuition waiver and stipend. "How to meet the 9 credit requirement without making my adviser's eyebrows raise when I ask for 6 credits worth of reading hours? Aha, I'll pad it out with some language courses!" I started with Mandarin, and that was fun, but too much work. "Ok, screw it, I'll sign up for Japanese 101 even though I'm a little overqualified."
The Japanese department at Ohio State University is in love with Romaji and I've been subjected to some of the ugliest romanized Japanese the world has ever seen. It's not even standard romaji, but some crazy half-baked alternative romanji, with the amusing side effect that even English borrow words get screwed up (in this textbook, for instance, "ninja" would be spelled "ninza", and "Mitsubishi" would be "Mitubisi"!) Now, in preparing for lessons (I still have to memorize dialogs, so there is still some preparation), I have to actually reverse engineer this crazy abomination of language to figure out what it's actually saying in Japanese.
My cross-training with both kanji and romanji gives me a unique perspective to compare the two systems, and the verdict is in. Kanji to the people! All for kanji and kanji for all! Give me kanji or give me death!
FURTHER READING
The ultimate cutting-edge technology for learning the kanji is James Heisig's "Remembering The Kanji". Click there to read my awesome book review (my very first popular article), which also includes some of the general theory behind memory which is used in Heisig.
One of the things I learned when I tried a 30-day French blitz, was how mistaken the whole "Japanese is impossible!!!" thing is. I actually found that beyond the intimidation and exageration, in the end Japanese is very logical and reasonable. Read about how few irregular verbs Japanese has, for example.
Obviously, my time in undergrad Japanese class wrestling with Satan's Own Romaji, has ruined English letters for me forever. Look, I even wrote an article on Why English Shouldn't Be The Official Language Of The United States!
Knowing the English word is useful for learning Japanese because it gives you a "free" Japanese vocabulary word. (For some other examples of "free" Japanese vocabulary, check out my article, Japanese Vocabulary You Already Know.) For these English borrow words, it's natural and right to use romaji to write the English words. (And for the Japanese words, kanji should be used.)
Unfortunately, a lot of textbook writers use romaji for everything. As a result, a lot of textbooks allegedly about Japanese, are actually about some strange artificial language, "Romaji Japanese", which noone in the world actually uses. Studying Romaji Japanese is useless, time-wasting, and it isn't even any easier than real Japanese. Textbook authors who write so-called "Japanese" textbooks in Romaji are peddling junk. University departments who choose to use those textbooks are abusing their position of authority and misleading students. Of course, the departments aren't doing this deliberately, they're just acting from the best knowledge they have, which unfortunately is very flawed.
THE MISCONCEPTION: KANJI IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR NON-ASIANS??
There's an idea flying around that Chinese characters are just too hard for non-Asians to learn. As if having slightly darker skin magically makes a person better able to read the characters. There are two reasons for the difficulty of kanji.
First, there's the intimidation factor. In Western culture, we're taught from childhood that Chinese characters are some evil contraption of Satan. We've all heard the twisted horror stories of Chinese children taking ten years to learn to read a newspaper; hey, when was the last time you saw a nine-year-old of any culture reading a newspaper??
Second, there's the obsolete teaching factor. The Chinese characters are flush with logical structure, but this is generally ignored in kanji pedagogy. The traditional, mainstream method to learn a kanji is to repeat it many, many times, brute-forcing it into memory. This works for Japanese and Chinese children, because they have over a decade for it to work, and that's a decade where their full time job is to go to school. Adult language learners don't have a fraction of that much time to invest in learning.
Fortunately, there's an easier way to learn the kanji. In a sentence, use the kanji's built-in structure. When kanji C is made by squishing kanji A and kanji B together side-by-side, it's madness to teach kanji C before teaching kanji A and B, and yet that's just what classes often due, just because kanji C might happen to be used more frequently. (A moot point since you need to learn all three eventually) This no-brainer technique has been organized by James Heisig in his Remembering The Kanji book, which also uses some cutting edge visual memory techniques. Click that link to read my review of the book. People routinely learn all ~2000 "necessary" (Joyo) kanji in a year with Heisig, and some have reported doing it in six months.
BUT I WANNA START PRONOUNCING JAPANESE RIGHT NOW!!
One of the big arguments for romaji is that it allows students to start pronouncing Japanese right away. Fortunately, Japanese has a pair of alphabets (well, technically syllabaries). These alphabets are called "hiragana" and "katakana" and they allow Japanese words to be rendered phonetically.
A Japanese word will be made up of kana (hiragana or katakana), kanji (Chinese characters), or some mixture of both. The kana part, you can be reading almost right away. The readings of the kana are extremely regular, with so few irregularities you can count them on one hand with fingers to spare. For the kanji part, there's "furigana", which is where you write tiny kana above the kanji. With furigana, students can start pronouncing kanji in Japanese 101.
Of course, when kana is used instead of romaji, students must learn to read the kana. This does add a little time before the students can start reading Japanese, but they're gonna need to learn to read kana eventually anyway. May as well get it over with!
What's more, Romaji doesn't even capture the Japanese perfectly. There are some sounds in Japanese which don't exist in English, and their transliterated romaji bastardations are just very rough approximations. The most famous example is the Japanese alveolar tap, a mix between R and L and D which is usually written with an "R" in romaji. (Yep, even the word "romaji" itself, is not pronounced like it's written in romaji. The first sound in "romaji" is the Japanese alveolar tap.)
So even with romaji, an otherwise untrained student can't start pronouncing Japanese properly yet. It takes a lot of exposure to the language to master the few sounds Japanese has which English doesn't have. I was studying, with lots of exposure, for years before I even realized I was butchering the Japanese "n". (Actually, it was on my second date ever with my girlfriend, that she taught me about the truth of the Japanese "n". I didn't get comfortable with it until I studied nasal vowels in general when I did a 30-day French Language Blitz.)
KANJI IS EASIER THAN ROMAJI
There's a reason that the oldest language system in history, Chinese, uses Chinese characters instead of an alphabet. Contrary to racist Western misconceptions, Chinese characters are the most advanced writing system.
Compare these two alternatives and consider which one is wiser:
1. You study an alphabet for one month and master it, and then spend 80 years reading things at a speed of 5 Metric Readtimes.
2. You study Chinese characters for five years and master the important ones, and then spend 75 years reading things at a speed of 25 Metric Readtimes.
Obviously it's better to invest a little more in school and read much faster your entire life.
Biased western scholars argue that alphabets are more advanced because "there're less of them thar symbol thingies to larn!" However, if we followed this reasoning to its logical extreme, then the most advanced writing system would be binary, with just two letters, say "1" and "0". That works fine for computers, but try devising a reasonable human writing system like that. Or we could take it even further and use a 1-letter tally mark system! "X" means "yes", "XX" means "no", "XXX" means "me", "XXXX" means "you".. and you don't wanna see the spelling for "superconductor"!
One of the huge advantages of kanji is that the "letters" (or symbols) that "spell" a word also contribute meaning to the word. Thus, by the time you're an intermediate student, you can deduce the meaning of words you've never seen before, just by how they're "spelled"! This aspect of Japanese is totally lost when the language is transliterated ("transbutcherated" would be a better word) into Roman script.
LEARNING VOCABULARY
When we read fluently, we rarely fixate on individual letters or characters, no matter which writing system we're using. Instead, we memorize the general appearance of the words. If you're a native speaker of English, you never stop reading to spell out the word "the".
Part of learning to read fluently is the process of memorizing the shapes of the common words. This isn't something you wanna specifically drill (it'll be drilled automatically as you drill the higher level parts of the language, like sentences), but you want to always be exposed to the shapes of the words, so that you'll gradually become familiar with them in a natural way.
In a traditional Japanese course, it's typical for the students to see almost no Japanese words written in real Japanese for the entire first year. That means they're throwing away that entire year, memorizing the shapes of the romaji bastardizations of Japanese words. As if they were studying to travel to Romajiland, some non-existant country where everything was written in Romanized Japanese.
And then when they get past the intro year sequence, they have to memorize the Japanese shapes of all those romanized words anyway. So they gained nothing. They may as well have converted the Japanese into freakin' Arabic script and memorized that. Heck, at least then, they'd've learned something about Arabic!
JAPANESE HOMONYMS
The dis-ambiguating effect of kanji, together with the relatively limited phonetic inventory in Japanese, has led to a language chock-full of homonyms. Some words have TONS of homonyms. Just as an example, I did a search for words which Romanize to "sensei". In addition to the usual meaning of "teacher, doctor, karate master" we're all familiar with, the following words also Romanize to "sensei" (and in Japanese they're all spelt differently):
1. head-start (baseball jargon)
2. despotism, autocracy
3. oath, abjuration, pledge
4. ancient sage; specifically, Confucius
5. recessiveness
6. astrology (prefix only)
7. affidavit (prefix only)
If you were learning Japanese using nothing but Roman letters, you'd think these 8 words/prefixes were just one single word with 8 different totally unrelated meanings!
LEARNING HOW TO LEARN JAPANESE
Another good thing about Kanji is that it teaches the student how to really learn Japanese in general. If all you know is romanized Japanese, then you'd better pray the word you're looking for is in a romaji dictionary. Such dictionaries do exist, but they are utterly inadequate to learn the language.
If the student ever hopes to become fluent in Japanese, she'll eventually have to reach a point where she's picking up new vocabulary outside the classroom and outside the romanized textbook. That means she's gonna have to start picking it up from real, flesh-and-blood, Japanese-in-the-wild. If she's been using roman transliteration as a crutch throughout her classes, she'll be starting over from 101 when she gets to this point.
ROMANJI VS. KATAKANA
Japanese students of English have a similar problem in intro courses. As insane as it is, a lot of Japanese ESL material attempts to convert English into katakana, the Japanese syllabary for foreign borrow words. This has all the problems I've already described for when we do it, plus the fact that English phonetics are far richer than Japanese. To put it in a sentence, katakana-ized English leads to a lot of Japanese people utterly, mercilessly failing at English-- without even knowing it.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH KANJI VS. ROMAJI
When I first started studying Japanese, it was purely self-study (I pride myself on being a life-long autodidact). Initially, I had no clue what to do. I started with the about.com material on Japanese grammar, which is in Romaji. I thought, "Chinese characters are crazy.. who wants to put in that much work to learn them.. I'll just learn spoken Japanese and be content with that."
I was having a lot of difficulty learning just very basic stuff- the colors (what's all this nonsense about adjective colors vs. noun colors??), family members, verb conjugations. Of course now I understand why it was so hard-- I wasn't studying Japanese, I was studying a bastardized Romananese which was Japanese minus the writing system specifically tailor made for Japanese, which writing system was replaced by one intended for the families of language as far removed from Japanese as possible!
Eventually, I stumbled onto Tae Kim's Japanese Guide To Japanese Grammar, the premier free online Japanese Grammar textbook. Tae Kim is an advocate of kanji-from-day-1. I was a skeptic and didn't wanna take him at his word, but when I started going through his textbook, I was very quickly converted to kanji.
Fast foward. As a math PhD student specializing in mathematical logic, my mathematical interests are becoming more and more specialized and focused, which means each quarter, fewer and fewer of the math courses at my dept. are applicable to me. At the same time, I'm required to take 9 credits each quarter because I'm a TA with full tuition waiver and stipend. "How to meet the 9 credit requirement without making my adviser's eyebrows raise when I ask for 6 credits worth of reading hours? Aha, I'll pad it out with some language courses!" I started with Mandarin, and that was fun, but too much work. "Ok, screw it, I'll sign up for Japanese 101 even though I'm a little overqualified."
The Japanese department at Ohio State University is in love with Romaji and I've been subjected to some of the ugliest romanized Japanese the world has ever seen. It's not even standard romaji, but some crazy half-baked alternative romanji, with the amusing side effect that even English borrow words get screwed up (in this textbook, for instance, "ninja" would be spelled "ninza", and "Mitsubishi" would be "Mitubisi"!) Now, in preparing for lessons (I still have to memorize dialogs, so there is still some preparation), I have to actually reverse engineer this crazy abomination of language to figure out what it's actually saying in Japanese.
My cross-training with both kanji and romanji gives me a unique perspective to compare the two systems, and the verdict is in. Kanji to the people! All for kanji and kanji for all! Give me kanji or give me death!
FURTHER READING
The ultimate cutting-edge technology for learning the kanji is James Heisig's "Remembering The Kanji". Click there to read my awesome book review (my very first popular article), which also includes some of the general theory behind memory which is used in Heisig.
One of the things I learned when I tried a 30-day French blitz, was how mistaken the whole "Japanese is impossible!!!" thing is. I actually found that beyond the intimidation and exageration, in the end Japanese is very logical and reasonable. Read about how few irregular verbs Japanese has, for example.
Obviously, my time in undergrad Japanese class wrestling with Satan's Own Romaji, has ruined English letters for me forever. Look, I even wrote an article on Why English Shouldn't Be The Official Language Of The United States!
Posts
5 comments:
I just found out your blog and I must say it's absolutely great! You write very well! I am also a language student. Nowadays I am focusing more on the English language, but I also have knowledge in Japanese, Spanish and a bit of French. I am from Brazil, just to let you know... Regards!
Huge kudos for your interesting articles. I'm Peter Payne of J-List and have been blogging on language for a long time. You have some great ideas.
What is your evidence for the 5:25 difference in reading rates that you claim?
If as you claim the native english speaker learns to scan the "shape" of words while reading, as does the native japanese speaker, then you seem to have undercut your claim that alphabetic writing is slower to read.
Hi. i just discovered your blog as wel.. I am planning on going to Japan in 2010. So right now I am studying kanji on my own (using the RtK book by James. I found this book rerenced many places) and I am learning a lot I must say. Thank you for telling that romanji is useless, i can stop studying that.
Although I find English and other alphabet languages (besides Spanish <.<) to be a bit more "logical" and all around "useful" (language of business, language of the internet, language of programming) than Chinese/Japanese and other symbol-based languages (Yes I've learned Chinese and I'm Rosetta Stoning myself into the wonderful world of Japan! Go Manga!), that won't stop me from learning them all! Muahahahahah!!
Post a Comment