Start learning Japanese

9 comments

1. Absolutely not. Becoming fluent in Japanese takes many years and requires dedicated study of all Japanese scripts. Not that it would be impossible to speak Japanese without learning the scripts, but almost no one would do it, and it would actually make it harder to learn

2. Sadly a big no to your question. You have to get through all character systems including Kanji.

3. If a child can learn kanji, you can do it. By the way, you don’t need to learn to write them, just how to read them. Writing is only useful if you’re going to be living in Japan, and even then I’ve heard you only use it a few times a year depending on your job.

4. If your aim is talking, you’re fine. You don’t need to learn to read or write to talk. But, it’ll make it easier to remember things if you do learn to read at the least. Learning new words will probably be a ballache if done with just romaji.

5. No way bro thought learning romaji can become fluent 💀💀

6. Define fluent.

   You might be able to have the most basic possible conversation using stuff you learned in a guide book.

   But this is hardly fluency, and to be able to achieve even a basic sense of fluency, you will need to learn the written systems.

   Even just learning hiragana gives you an understanding of the [moraic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)#Japanese) system used by Japanese, which is decidedly different to the syllabic system used in European languages.

   Indeed, the more you learn, the more of an edge you get in spoken Japanese as well. It’s not something where you can just focus on the spoken language; learning written Japanese to at least some extend will *speed up* your learning of the spoken language.

7. Most materials which use only or primarily romaji are very, very basic. You’ll be able to speak a very, very basic form of Japanese.

   You should learn to at least read (and type) the kana and kanji so you can access higher level Japanese materials and express yourself more fully.

8. kids who are 6 learn kana

   it only takes a few hours, may as well

9. this is like asking if you can be fluent in english without knowing the alphabet, whilst I guess it might *technically* be possible you would literally have to learn every single thing in isolation as you wouldnt have the actual characters to string them together in your head, so whilst yes it might be *possible* you would most likely shave *years* of your time spent learning it if you just took the time to learn the characters