The language school I attended all but banned romanization. The idea was to learn, practice, and finally internalize kana and kanji as quickly as possible. Hepburn is just a band-aid when it comes to language study.
For people not interested in learning Japanese, however, a unified romanization could have its benefits. It just never struck me as particularly inconsistent to begin with, even after so many years living there.
There’s another school of teaching, where kana and kanji are banned for the first 2-3 semesters because they are a distraction to learn and internalize words and grammar.
I’ve met a few students of this textbook system when I was on exchange and my impression was that they were very skilled at Japanese for the amount of time they’ve been a student and what they told about their seniors was they pick up kanji fast, since they already know the words.
The big problem of course is that it is completely incompatible with other schools. Where do you place them when they go on exchange? With the n3 or n5 students?
Anyway, I always thought it was interesting that the exact antithesis of RTK* exists and works.
*RTK or “remembering the kanji” is a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word. It’s quite popular online as it lends itself very well to solo studying.
There’s another school of teaching, which bans all reading, writing, and speaking altogether in favor of exclusively native speaker verbal input for the first 6-12+ months of learning. Some YouTubers seem to like the idea of this, though sounds pretty extreme.
> *RTK or “remembering the kanji” is a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word. It’s quite popular online as it lends itself very well to solo studying.
One thing I have found over the years, I have never met a foreigner living in Japan who has used it extensively. (Many were aware of it, but few used it heavily.) However, there is a lively community of online learners who use it. (Don't read that as a judgement against using it; this is simply an observation.)
I was surprised to read this part:
> a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word
I have never heard this description before. I always thought it was a learning aid to use mnemonics to remember the meaning of individual kanji. If someone can complete all volumes of RTK before "learn[ing] their first word", I would be stunned. It would be a feat of super-human level of memorization and recall. That said, the Internet is a huge place with billions of people. There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell you about their success using it.
"all" might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the philosophy is to learn to recognize roughly 2000 kanji before starting the actual language learning. Volume 2 and 3 are supposed to complement more normal language learning.
The theory is based on the authors experience seeing Chinese and Korean students learn much, much faster than their western peers in Japanese language classes, coupled with an argument for "If you can read 50% of characters, you still can't read"
I'm surprised you've never come across this, as it is in the foreword.
> There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell you about their success using it.
I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)
Good for him. He was a strong student, but I wouldn't recommend it.
I have always felt furigana bridges that gap well enough in written learning. The downside is that it might become a crutch, but it can't for long if you are serious about learning reading. Native materials pretty quickly drop furigana.
Like with a lot of things like this, if you learn for long enough the differences in the major approaches work themselves out.
About 25 years ago, I studied Hebrew. It is a fascinating language to me (as is Arabic). One of the features, weirdly similar to furigana, is the "dots" placed above vowels to indicates how to pronouce words. (Sorry, I don't know the technical linguistic term to describe these dots.) In regular texts, these dots are excluded, and readers are expected to (essentially) have the dots memorized. I always struggled to read Hebrew text without the dots.
In the last 10 years in Japan, more and more goverment documents are now available with furigana. Sometimes the edition is called "Friendly Japanese" (yasashii nihongo / やさしい日本語). The best explaination I can think of: There has been a dramatic rise in the number of non-university-educated foreign workers who have come to Japan on labor contracts -- factory workers, farm workers, hotel staff, shop staff, etc. They need to live their daily lives in Japan, but will struggle with native-level Japanese documents, so the gov't (both national and local) make an effort to reduce this friction. I expect the level of support from local gov'ts will be very much correlated to the number of foreign workers in their districts.
Kunrei-shiki is intended for domestic Japanese use. That's why it results in spellings that don't make logical sense for any Latin-based phonology. It's too focused on round trip unambiguity at the cost of phonetic clarity for non-Japanese. My big peeve is the company Mitutoyo using K-S, which everyone mispronounces because they don't know it's a poor transcription of "Mitsutoyo".
Yeah my impression was the Orthography is pretty consistent compared to English.
From what I understand this isn't the first time they've made some kind of change to orthography, I remember reading something about updating offical use of certain kana to reflect more modern pronunciations. It wasn't a dramatic change.
It's interesting to see some countries just have this centralised influence over something like how their language is written as they're the main ones speaking it, as opposed to English.
> Yeah my impression was the Orthography is pretty consistent compared to English.
As a native English speaker, I have learned this watching non-natives try to learn English spelling over the years. It is hell! I studied French in middle school and high school. I remember there being a similar level of ambiguity in their orthography (similar to English).
One weird thing that I have noticed when Japanese native speakers write emails in English: Why don't they use basic spell check? I'm talking about stuff as basic as: "teh" -> "the". Spell checkers from the early 1990s could easily correct these issues. To be clear, I rarely have an issue to understand the meaning of their emails (as a native speaker, it is very easy to skip over minor spelling and grammar mistakes), but I wonder: Why not spell check before you send?
> As a native English speaker, I have learned this watching non-natives try to learn English spelling over the years. It is hell! I studied French in middle school and high school. I remember there being a similar level of ambiguity in their orthography (similar to English).
Yes. I think english is even slightly worth than french wrt spelling/sound mismatches, but you can call me biased. Moreover, William the Conqueror, who brought civilization to England, also brought the inconsistencies of the french spelling with him.
> I wonder: Why not spell check before you send?
Well, some of my coworkers don't either, from french to french. And up to recently in most programs it was a bother to switch back and forth between 2 languages.
But really, that's probably about common laziness; the typos you mention can be caught by proof-reading before sending, which can also catch other mistakes like missing words or inconsistent sentences caused rewrites.
Proof-reading just after writing is not the best tho, as you tend to skip words because it is "too fresh". I try to introduce some time gap between the too (for instance, proof-reading after lunch or the next morning).
For people not interested in learning Japanese, however, a unified romanization could have its benefits. It just never struck me as particularly inconsistent to begin with, even after so many years living there.