A while ago, I had dinner at a US Japanese restaurant with a Japanese native who told me that it was very hard to read the romaji menu. She was fluent in English so I know she could recognize roman characters, but now I’m kind of wondering what she meant.
I presumed that reading romaji words would be no dre difficult than than reading phonetic hiragana or katakana. Like I see dual-spelling (i.e. kanji+romaji) and even triple spelling like on trains (Kanji+hiragana+romaji) all over Japan so I know you have to be exposed to it. Maybe natives learn to ignore the romaji so they really don’t get experience using it, thus it’s hard to understand when words are romaji alone?
Or is the word recognition process different for Japanese natives, like would it be equally difficult to read the menu if it was only in hiragana?
4 comments
imagine if someone wrote an english menu using katakana
youd be able to understand it but it’s not how English is normally written
It’s not that it’s necessarily difficult but much easier in Japanese since it’s much less cluttered and no confusion with homophones
When you read letters, you actually don’t take them one by one but a chunk. That’s why you can catch them faster than you pronounce. When they’re written in romaji, however, we have to convert them into kana one by one, then, keep some in mind to recognize a word. In short, we actually have to decode it before reading.
Think of it this way. If I read song lyrics in romaji I can read them very quickly. If I read them in kana, it’s still phonetic but my reading speed drops like a brick. I can understand it, but it’s a lot more difficult, and a lot less natural to my brain.