“Don’t learn through romaji”. What does this actually mean?

13 comments

1. It means not learning hiragana/katakana at all, and instead learning Japanese vocab and grammar by only writing the words using the Roman alphabet.

   Like *watashi wa nihongo wo benkyo shimasu*

2. You are apparently not learning through romaji which is why you can’t understand the statement “don’t learn through romaji”

3. >does it mean to pronounce ひらがな the way it’s written in hiragana, instead of saying it like here-uh-goh-nuh in romaji?

   I mean, yeah. Looking at Japanese pronunciation through the lens of English pronunciation is something people say to avoid. Others might also say “Japanese is pronounced like Spanish, so you can map the rōmaji to that instead of English,” but that’s also not very good. らりるれろ would, for example, not be pronounced accurately using the Spanish R sound. It would be simpler to just learn Japanese sounds and their written forms in the context of Japanese.

   >Or does it mean studying it a different way without utilizing romaji, which I don’t know how that’d be possible.

   This is also a good way to interpret it. Some people may make the case that for some people it’s genuinely not possible to hear things properly in a new language (>!kind of like how most Japanese people will tend to just mix and match L and R sounds because they supposedly can’t hear the difference and it would all invariably be represented by the Japanese らりるれろ sounds until they get better at English!<). However, it’s also entirely possible to learn a new script using only sound. Train yourself to hear “あ” when you see “あ” rather than associating it with “a” or “ah”. Case in point, hiragana learning materials for Japanese children don’t actually include rōmaji since they already know the sound and don’t require learning a 26-letter alphabet first before tackling roughly double that in just one kana set. They just hear “あ” when they see “あ”. Hell, [according to this](https://homework-recipe.com/romaji), it was decided that starting in the 2020 school year, elementary school children were to start learning rōmaji in the third grade. There have been plenty of Japanese language writing reforms since World War II and yet they STILL didn’t see fit to push learning rōmaji to, say, preschool like how some other countries might have it.

   Give learning the written language by sound. Unless your capacity to hear the language is wonky, learning without rōmaji whatsoever is going to be totally doable.

4. Japanese teacher here.

   It simply means as soon as you know hiragana and katakana, you don’t use romaji anymore. You won’t need it – you will be able to use hiragana as a pronunciation guide for unknown kanji. Many (not all) learners can memorise both scripts within a month.

   While the method sarita mentioned is real (especially focused on spoken language) that would be learning only through romaji, which is not what you asked about.

5. Means prioritise learning hiragana and katakana and start trying to wrap your head around kanji ASAP and don’t rely on the Roman alphabet. Learning the writing system of the language is quintessential and the more of it you understand, the less in the dark you’ll feel

6. I’ll draw from my experiences in the Japanese American / Nikkei community, and talk about some of the very real issues that have arisen with regard to family history research being undertaken now by 4th, 5th+ generation Nikkei who do not know kana or kanji.

   Most of us know the names of our grandparents and maybe great-grandparents in romaji, because that’s how we were taught. For example, my great-grandfather had his name romanized as Doda Oyama.

   So, I looked for information for one 小山 (or is it 大山?) どだ. But, hmm, どだ does not seem like a Japanese given name at all. And, of course, there was no information.

   Lo and behold, I was shown a photo of my great-grandfather, and on the back was some kanji: 父小山同太. Aha — the romaji itself was a few steps off, which led to incorrect kana, which made it impossible to ascertain the kanji.

   One word in romaji could theoretically lead to multiple kana. I just read a Reddit post by a Japanese Brazilian trying to write Honda Yudi in Japanese. Honda, everyone agreed on — 本田. But Yudi — an English speaker would say ユディ or ユーディ or ユディー. The Brazilian OP guessed ユヂ, which led people to say maybe it’s ユジ or more likely ユウジ.

   From my standpoint, understanding now that Japanese names can all be read the same way but with different kanji — think of a name like Masayuki and it can be written 正行, 正之, 昌幸, 雅之, 昌之, 真之, etc. etc. etc. and each of those tiny variations is considered a different name… imagine how horrifying it can be for a Nikkei family historian to sift through English records and not be able to access Japanese primary source records just because they’ve grown to rely so heavily on romaji (and! even if correct, the kana may not even lead to the right kanji).

   I stress to other family historians all the time that good Nikkei family history records *must* capture both the legal name in Japanese (i.e., if written in kana, then kept in kana; if written in kanji, then kept in kanji) *and* the yomigana (which is where romaji records can help). Family trees to me are incomplete without both pieces of the puzzle.

7. You should focus on hiragana, katakana and kanji.

   Romaji has its uses and is worth knowing (it’s quite simple, so that’s not a problem), but don’t use it in place of Japanese script – use it as an adjunct to communicate/interface with Latin based people and tools.

   E.g. If you need explanatory information about a Japanese word or phrase in English, then searching for it in romaji is far more likely to return information in English.

8. Romaji is useful for me because I know Chinese and the Kanji trips me up bad as I’m learning/unlearning things since this is the first time I’m learning the language so arguably hiragana would help but it’s still my own confusion I have to deal with myself.

9. Well… When I struggle to understand something I just flip it round.

   So imagine a Japanese person that knows zero English and instead of learning how to read English they use katakana for everything.

   How would you feel about someone who studied English this way?

   Now of course kanji isn’t just something you can learn but hiragana and katakana are. And easily too.

   I learned both in a few hours with a flash card system. Just repeated until I wasn’t making mistakes anymore.

10. When I took Japanese classes in college, we used romaji for maybe a week just to learn some basic words. Then it went directly into learning hiragana and katakana and we never used romaji again. It may be more difficult at first for some but it helps in the long run.

11. I can understand stuff when I read romanji, but it puts me at higher risk of forgetting certain hirigana or katakana like the difference between ru and ro or u and wa, which I feel start slipping away the moment I take too long a break from reading/writing them.

    There’s also some sneaky pronunciations exceptions like “wo” sometimes being pronounced “o” and “ha” pronounced as “wa” after a subject, which I think would be better remembered/understood by reading in the native text, because they could be easily lost in romanji.

12. “Romaji” is just Japanese words written with Latin characters.

    For example, “Hiragana”, “Katakana”, and “Kanji” instead of ひらがな、カタカナ、and 漢字 from your very post are examples of you using romaji.

    Another example would be “konichiwa” instead of こんにちは.

    When people say “don’t learn through romaji”, they mean exactly that. You should – as soon as possible – stop using study materials that write Japanese words with Latin characters.

    It’s obviously unreasonable to be expected to jump straight into text written with full kanji, but memorizing hiragana should be pretty much the *first* thing you do – before anything else – when learning Japanese. With katakana not long after that.

    If you focus exclusively on learning these two syllabaries, it should only take you a couple weeks to be able to recognize them all consistently. You won’t be able to read it quickly, but that’s why you’re learning it first: that way all your *future* learning is also – in part – reinforcing your memorization of the basic scripts.

    Notably, it seems like you’re already following this advice, just unintentionally. I think the reason you are struggling to understand what this advice is suggesting is because you don’t seem to be the type of person this advice is aimed at. If you keep doing what you’re already doing, you should be totally fine!

13. In my college 101 course, we spent 1 week learning hiragana and 1 week learning katakana. Getting off of or never using Romanji should not even be a big controversy. If you find yourself in romanji world for a while, you are being really inefficient