There’s Romaji,hiragana,katakana, and one other I forget.
Please explain Romaji to me. It’s for beginners of Japanese. That part
I understand. What I don’t get is since I’ve learned romaji as how to speak Japanese.
Then why do u stop using it once u learn hiragana/katakana?
The one you can’t remember is kanji (Chinese characters). As for romaji, you never entirely stop using it. As for why it most gets pushed to the side, the answer is fairly simple: roman characters don’t accurately demonstrate pronunciation. A big example which you are probably already familiar with is “R” series (ra, ri, ru, re, ro). There is no true “R” sound in Japanese. It is sort of halfway between pronouncing “R” and “L”. So, for an English speaker, instead of trying to force new rules for sound on to old symbols, it is much better to associate the sounds with new symbols. Besides, wouldn’t you like to be able to read Japanese as well as speak it? Anyone else have further comments on his question or my explanation?
I always thought it was Romanji and not Romaji, since it uses the latin/roman alphabet.
Also, another reason you stop using Romanji and even Hiragana (Not entirely) Is because there are words that overlap, for example hana and hana is Japanese for Flower AND for nose, which even in hiragana you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, So in comes Kanji. ??and???are a lot easier to tell apart than ?? and??? (hana and hana)
As well, some words are very very long and having to read blocks of hiragana can get annoying, Kanji allows you to get information a lot faster.
As for Katakana, it is used mostly for foreign characters, most commonly in names and foreign products for example???or???Coffee or pizza)?
It’s also used for various other things like countries and more or less anything not native to Japan.
I personally would not recommend using Romanji to learn Japanese because if you ever see the words even if you know what they mean you wouldn’t know what they are if they were in anything other than Romanji.
The more you read the faster you get at it and the better, Romanji does not do this to help you read actual Japanese any better so I wouldn’t recommend it.
As for the spoken, if you don’t know how to pronounce things you should definatly take some classes from a native speaker of Japan, as it will vastly improve your skills in spoken, writing and reading.
:lol:
First, let me thank you for catching that bit I spaced out on baxaca. Now for a bit of rambling.
Calling it “romanji” is a common mistake. The first part of the confusion comes from the fact that in English, depending on linguistic rules I don’t fully understand, adding “an” denotes possession. For example, calling something Hungarian indicates that it belongs to the country of Hungary. In Japanese, (in this case) the possession is understood without being stated with the particle ?, just like with the word kanji. Broken down and analyzed character by character, kanji (??) consists of ?, meaning “Sino-; China”, and ?, meaning “character; letter; word”. Thus literally meaning the characters of China. The second part of the confusion is that, as far as I can tell, the r?ma (???) part of r?maji (???) doesn’t come from English. It most likely comes from the Italian and Latin name for what we call Rome in English, that being Roma. While I’m still just a beginner when it comes to Japanese and thus don’t fully understand all the rules of how to render a foreign word in katakana, I think that if it had come from English, then it would be rendered as ??? (r?muji).
Maybe i just put the “n” in there when I heard it, :lol:
As for your explanation I totally understand how you got “Romaji” as well as how I would get “Romanji” and that makes perfect sense.
I think it may also vary based on where you are in the world, since I hear most people just call it “Romanji” I followed in kind, even though I would totally know what you meant if you used any of the aforementioned names for it.
Thanks for clearing that up for me, I just went with whatever made the most sense to my english speaking brain, which you pretty muched cleared up. Something tells me I added the ‘n’ in there on my own in retrospect :? .
Sorry if anything I said was off I was just trying to help
“Tomato, tomatoe” as they say 
No worries, it is an extremely common error. In fact, it is so common that there is an entry in the WWWJDIC for it under ???. An interesting side note for you: while it may be romaji for the characters, apparently when talking about the language family (Romance languages), it is ??? (romansugo).
Romaji is useless because about 99% of native Japanese speakers can’t understand it. If you come to Japan, you will not find anything written in romaji. Sure you’ll find English, but outside of train stations and tourist spots, it won’t make much sense (Engrish). If you want to actually communicate in Japanese through writing, you have to learn Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji.
Hell, Western Romaji and Japanese Romaji don’t even match! For example: “?” Western Romaji will write it as “chi” However in Japan it’s officialy romanized as “ti”. “chi” is phonetically closer to the actual Japanese sound, but “ti” is a more correct romanization going by Japanese Linguistic rules. You can’t take shortcuts with learning a language. It will only hurt your own progress.
Romaji is intended for use by foreigners to learn Japanese. Having someone directly learn Japanese via hiragana/katakana is clearly possible, but due to most Western writing systems, it easier to use romaji for the vast majority. Koreans have their own (informally called Romaja). It’s not just East Asian languages… Arabic and Hebrew (as well as dozens more) are in the same boat.
In the country of the native language, “romanization” isn’t going to cut it because they have no need to romanize anything. SuperDeadite is correct: expecting to see romanized letters in Japan, is like expecting to see Japanese letters in the US. Is it done? Of course. In New York, near the UN building, there’s tons of signs with Japanese on them. But in mainstream America? Hells no. Same goes for Japan. In Tokyo there’s a lot of romaji signs and newspapers… cause that’s were foreigners commonly hang out. In the outback farmlands of Hachinohe? Good luck (unless you live near Misawa).
I always consider the Japanese system of romaji to be wrong. Political correct issue aside: Romaji is for foreigners to use. Thus the pronunciation system should be adapted for OUR tastes - not theirs. Of course great care should be taken to match how romaji is taught, to match how the Japanese say their own words. However romaji is their language converted into ours… not our language converted into theirs. The Japanese “version” of romaji fails to understand that. Basically it comes down, that the Japanese education system doesn’t like how we use “Chi” in our own (“Tsu” is another one). Well too bad. Our phonetics are screwy like that: let us figure out how to get it right - we usually do after a few months of practice.
Agreed, Romaji = the suck, :lol:
I have two ways to learn Japanese at my disposal.
My japanese coach on the ds. Which I’m able to learn to
Read,write, and pronounce the romaji/hiragana,katakana,kanji. Plus I also have 4 japanese Language tutorial cds from pimsleur. (the language CDs claim to have You speaking japanese in ten days?) okay maybe but fluent in ten no way.my problem is I like to organize what I learn.
For example I probably won’t memorize hiragana till I have all the parts of it. Like ra,ga and so on.
Since the ds is done on chapters and they broke hiragana to different chapters.
Also the language cds seem to be done to teaching certain phrases.
Of course I’ve only listened to one cd so far but it’s only 4 hrs so how much can you put into that?
My guess not a sole lot.