I think it’s probably a mistake to use Hepburn if you’re learning Japanese, it kinda gets in the way. Either learn kana (which takes what, a week?) or use one of the other romanization systems which maps more cleanly to Japanese orthography
I think it’s probably a mistake to use Hepburn if you’re learning Japanese, it kinda gets in the way. Either learn kana (which takes what, a week?) or use one of the other romanization systems which maps more cleanly to Japanese orthography
It’s a deliberate choice in the article. I cover every single caveat with it explicitly. I also mention this:
> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
That note isn’t much to go on.
I think the choice is not a good one, whether it is deliberate or by accident, it is not a good choice either way. The main caveat to Hepburn is that it’s unsuitable for explaining how Japanese works and it’s unsuitable for learning Japanese—so before you start working on verb conjugations, you pick up kana or one of the romanizations which is more aligned with Japanese.
The idea that you “shouldn’t think in romaji” is really “you shouldn’t think in Hepburn”. This is an important distinction! Japanese has a relatively small inventory of phonemes, somewhere around 20 or 22 of them, and they map very neatly to the latin alphabet.
But the article doesn’t make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points.
IMO, this is kind of like seeing an article about how monads are burritos. Thinking that a monad is a burrito does not help me understand monads.
Nomu -> noma-nai / nomi-masu / nome-ru / nomo-u
Miru -> mi-nai / mi-masu / mire-ru / miyo-u
The ichidan and godan verbs are not assigned different categories because existing scholars of Japanese are just bad at explaining how they work, and you can still understand them just fine in romaji. I put the hyphens above to mark a place where you could think that the verb ends and the common conjugation forms end, and you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the “tricks”—but some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out (are you familiar with miru -> miyou conjugation, or miru -> mirareru?)
I concede that using Nihon-shiki maybe would’ve been more elegant for what I tried to do in the article.
> But the article doesn’t make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points.
Not at all. I give it two sections and then we move on. It doesn’t affect literally anything else on the page. You just learn to shift rows and move on. To make what points?
> you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the “tricks”—but some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out
I’m not quite sure what you mean to say in this part. I do cover -[r]eba and -[y]ou in the final section (“one more thing”) which extends the model to clearly handle that disappearing consonant. I think -[r]eru fits in there the same way, just as -[r]u itself.
I think explaining it as mi + [y]ou = miyou, but nom_ + [y]ou = nomou is a clearer way to think about this. The rule is that the hole burns down the leading consonant (but takes the vowel).
I've never understood how people can claim that learning kana takes a week. It clearly takes more time than that, considering how similar some of the symbols are and a lot of them only differ by double dashes or a stroke (think nu vs me, ne vs re, ro vs ru, chi vs sa, and so on). Then there are the combinations and even if you managed to learn hiragana, you still have to learn katakana.
Oh and I forgot, you have to actually learn how to listen, pronounce and speak them, not just learn a useless romanization mapping. I've heard way too many English speakers just say the romanization with English pronunciation. At that point their learning efforts turn into self sabotage.
In total that's definitively a month of effort, albeit spread out over the first year of learning.
I think "a week" is slightly optimistic, but I also think "a month" is slightly pessimistic. When I learned hiragana, I spent my free time drilling on RealKana [0]. I'd focus on a new column of the kana table, then bring in columns I'd already practiced, until eventually I could flash reliably on cards drawn from the entire table. This legitimately didn't take much longer than a week, because learning a single column in isolation is very quick, and the real difficulty comes in distinguishing similar kana (as you say). But I was able to drill similar kana by selecting two or three kana that would force me to see them often. (I still struggle slightly with wa, re, and ne, but I definitely know them.)
I also drilled on a drag-n-drop kana table [1] in a few ways -- sometimes I'd start from the kana and try to figure out where they should go in the table, and sometimes I'd go along rows or columns in the table and try to find the kana that belong there. These two directions drill both recognition and recollection.
Proper pronunciation is a cross-cutting concern. As a whole, it's not something you can reasonably learn solely from kana, but the aspects that are relevant are not difficult to pick up. Every kana breaks into one (vowels and N) or two (the rest) phonemes, and for the most part, the way you pronounce those phonemes is consistent across rows and columns of the table (admitting exceptions like "shi" and "tsu"). If you are taught those basics, learning how to pronounce kana is not hard. Training your ear to "hear" distinctions among English allophones, and to distinguish pitch accent from the more familiar stress accent, is much harder, and really has to come from experience, not just kana.
[0]: https://realkana.com/hiragana, wow it's improved since I last used it
[1]: https://ohelo.github.io/usagi-chan/hiragana/
It takes a week to learn the system and to know the existence of at least all the hiragana characters and memorize the sound of some of them.
It takes two weeks to know know the existence of all the kana characters (including katakana), to memorize the sound of enough of them to read some words, and to write some of them.
After a month you should have easily memorized the sound of all of them (maybe a rare one like ム slips by occasionally), be able to write most of them, and be able to read (albeit slowly) anything written in kana.