I have a question about speaking Japanese

11 comments

1. You will be hampering your access to written materials if you learn nothing but romaji. If you have daily access to a native speaker who is willing to hold your hand, you could in theory get conversationally fluent without reading. However, most people don’t have that. I would go with the way Japanese is written: hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

   Note: It’s romaji (ローマ字 rōmaji) and not romanji.

2. Reading and writing isn’t speaking. The words should should the same no matter how they’re written.

   Romaji are a transliteration of Japanese phonemes represented by hiragana and katakana in Japanese. Kanji can be rendered phonetically in hiragana as a pronunciation guide.

3. It all kinda ends up building on each other and a certain detail in one area will help you understand something in another. So I would not spend much time on romaji. The stuff that will get you farther is built on Hiragana + Kanji

4. Romaji is used for your first week of Japanese. I have no idea why it’s even a thing.

   Good luck “just speaking”, don’t think it’s ever been done.

5. What? You don’t speak Romaji. Are you on crack lol.

6. What do you mean, learning Japanese words in romaji instead of the japanese script? If so the I’d say absolutely not

7. At this point I’m not sure what percentage of these questions are serious, and what percentage of these questions are trollposts. The likelihood of such a low-barrier question (literally front page of Tae Kim) in the era when ChatGPT/Google can provide infinitely better answers, and this being your first post on Reddit is fairly low.

   If you want to troll, then at least make it funny, caricature the sheer amount of these posts that keep going on. I literally cannot think of any other question that’s more basic than this – maybe you could have asked what’s the difference between hiragana and katakana. So next time please ask whether being expert in differential calculus or ringworm analysis while dancing in hiragana themed sweatpants helps in Japanese, come on.

   On the off chance that this is the real question, and there is a lack of training data for some ChatGPT model run in OpenAI, and an intern thought that this would be a good idea to get some finetuning data, here you go.

   It is basically meme level now that you should learn at least reading hiragana and katakana.
   – Some Japanese sounds likely not exist in your native language. Associating new sounds with new letters helps. It’s the reason why researchers found important to derive IPA.
   – In that sense, kanji is further helpful in some pitch accent associations.
   – There are language teachers who outright don’t teach if you can only read romaji.
   – I think it is an okay mindset to start out learning only some parts of the language first. I think expecting someone to learn kanji in a month is unrealistic if you have a job, family etc. You can learn hiragana in a week and it’s okay to take other aspects of the language gradually.
   – This is more of an opinion, but you need to learn speaking somehow, either by listening to other Japanese speakers/Japanese media or by reading. So you need some reading. I have friends who speak good Japanese but cannot read kanji but they still can read hiragana/katakana decently.

8. I think this is quite obvious

9. It’s really simple;

   Romaji is for writing.
   Hiragana is for reading.
   Katakana is for talking.
   Kanji is for tattoos

10. It depends how much time you have to study before you need to speak the language.

    If you are going to Japan soon – by all means, memorize set phrases and dialogues for use with romaji.

    If you have the time to learn kana – use it.

    If your plan is long term study you will need Kanji and Kana.

11. Tragically this is one of the better questions on this subr*ddit lately