[eatsleepmonad]

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.

[wodenokoto]

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.

[throwaway2037]

    > *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.

For those unaware, the OP probably means this three part series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji

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.

[ehnto]

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.

[presentation]

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.

[kevin_thibedeau]

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".

[ehnto]

Oh! That's fun to learn, given where I am from (not Japan) we all call it "Mi-chu-toy-o". A combination of misunderstanding and dialect.

[akst]

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.

[throwaway2037]

    > 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?