I've found that any resource relying on any romaji after the first chapter or two is often a complete waste of time.

It slows down beginners needing to make the hard jump, since romaji is never used except for signs in real life, and it just becomes a distraction to the material for anyone who is not a complete beginner. Furigana is helpful to the intermediate learner, romaji just becomes harder to read at that point.

▲

danabramov 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve explicitly addressed this in the article. Cmd+F for a section called “why romaji is actually good” and then “why romaji is actually bad”. You may disagree with the approach, but I outlined my reasons for choosing it (as well as its downsides).

▲

Larrikin 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm saying I disagree.

It is always a crutch for the first year student or the barely passed second year student that never helps with real Japanese.

Writing out romaji in Japan is likely to confuse more than help someone else understand.

▲

danabramov 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You glossed over my point. I’m not using it as a “crutch” for reading. I’m using it to have notation for the stem — the thing before -u. I could choose alternative notation with kana (e.g. just always using the -u ending, or the idea of variable stems like i-stem and a-stem) but then the visual “gluing” wouldn’t work. Which is the whole point of mental model I’m communicating. It’s fine if you don’t find this mental model helpful but it’s the point of the article.

I’ll be honest that I also wanted (as a challenge) to write this article so that a person with zero Japanese knowledge would be able to correctly conjugate almost every word to every ending. This is more of a teaching drill for myself though but it’s another reason for the romaji choice.

▲

musicale 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The explanation made sense to me: romaji works well for vowel shifts (as the vowels aren't glued to consonants) while kana works well for consonant shifts (because the vowels are glued to consonants).

Latin text's smaller tokens/phonemes have advantages and disadvantages, but they are a convenient notation for getting the author's point across.

The difference in phonemes reminds me of how game designer Naramura came up with the (Spanish-sounding) name "La Mulana" for his game by spelling his name backwards in kana. In romaji it would have been "Arumaran" which is completely different (while in kanji it would have been "Muranara".)

	▲	thaumasiotes 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> while in kanji it would have been "Muranara" Not quite. If you change the order of some kanji, the general case is that the resulting text has no definite pronunciation. You definitely would not expect that the sounds assigned to the kanji in one ordering would be the same ones assigned in a new ordering. This is a phenomenon the Japanese sometimes play with. In the novel Musashi, Musashi comes up with that name by reinterpreting the characters of his actual name (which, in the novel, is Takezō).

▲

qingcharles 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Agree. Especially how easy it is honestly to learn hiragana. You can practically learn it in a day and keep a table next to you to look up every time you forget one.

If you're at the point you're learning verbs you'd be mad not to know how to read some kana.

▲

danabramov 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I explicitly address my reason for choosing it over kana in the article. If you disagree, please engage with the argument that’s already there.

	▲	eloisant 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The benefit you give (be able to "cut" a kana in the middle) is really weak, I've never seen anyone being confused by that when learning in kana. This is completely nullified by all the drawbacks of using romaji while learning and they're well known already. The only reason to use romaji for Japanese grammar is to explain the concepts to someone who has no interest in learning the language, just for their general knowledge.