Hey there! I want to start learning Japanese in my freetime. I can somewhat read hiragana, I only know a bunch of katakana, and I basically only know that å±± is the kanji for mountain. Finally, I found a Japanese book in my native language at a bookstore, but I found out that it teaches you Japanese only using romanji, which I heard is not the best way to learn. Is it worth learning from that, while somehow learning how to read and write besides it, or should I find other alternatives?
7 comments
Use hiragana
No you shouldn’t use a roma~~n~~ji textbook. Use hiragana.
What are your learning goals?
Since you’re describing doing this as a hobby, I suspect that you want to use it for media-consumption related reasons. In which case, building out your reading skills (eg: getting good with hiragana/katakana and learning a reasonable number of kanji) is recommended.
Romaji is only going to hurt you in the long run. You’re much better off ordering a book in all kana from the start. Reading will reinforce the kana you study. Romaji is really inconsistent and can lead to pronunciation issues even if you don’t plan to read much.
Use kana from the beginning.
What is your native language. Maybe someone here can recommend a resource.
Firstly, the word is Romaji (ãƒãƒ¼ãƒžå—), not Romanji. “Roma” refers to the Latin/Roman alphabet and “ji” means characters (especially kanji, but also hiragana and katakana)
I’d suggest not to be dependent on Romaji, because the Romaji pronunciations are only an Anglicised approximation of the actual Japanese sounds and not the real pronunciations. Rely on hiragana and katakana. If you’re self-studying, you could watch Japanese language videos on YouTube to learn how the characters are pronounced. But I’d suggest watching videos made by professional Japanese teachers, especially native Japanese ones, over people whose first language is not Japanese. Often, you’ll find videos by people whose first language is English and their Japanese pronunciation is horrible (as in, they’re relying on the Romaji pronunciations, which are wrong.)
People who use romaji tend to have pronunciation problems, since they associate them with English sounds rather than Japanese sounds. You’ll also be completely illiterate. Better to start with hiragana. In university, my professor gave us exactly one week to learn hiragana. Romaji was banned after that.