Romaji -_-

• 
  beeant July 4, 2010 at 11:50pm

  Hello,
  
  I can understand how you feel about reading hiragana/katakana. It must have been difficult.
  
  Actually, if you learn Japanese formally anywhere, I believe that you won't be dealing with romaji at all.
  
  So I guess, I will just have to vote if it is really necessary to put romaji in higher priority in our system.
  
  I am really sorry about this, but for your and all the user benefits, I dont want everybody to be dependent on romaji. I want everybody to eventually get used to read hiragana/katakana and kanji.
  
  Thank You,
  bn
• 
  StonerPenguin July 5, 2010 at 12:09am

  I hate romaji! I think it promotes Japanese illiteracy :/ I like this site the way it is :) But that's just my vote. It really doesn't take that long to learn hiragana... I learned it in a week. Try these out;
  http://smart.fm/goals/24666 (Master Hiragana)
  http://smart.fm/goals/24667 (Master Katakana)
  
  Doing Hiragana and Katakana handwriting practice really helped me learn them :D
  がんばってね！
  
• 
  spanz July 5, 2010 at 4:56am

  I agree with StonerPenguin. Romaji just slows you down (it almost halts you).
  It's necessary in order to learn the sounds of Kana, but otherwise, it's a hindrance.
  A week of work is indeed enough to learn Hiragana, and you'll NEVER need romaji anymore.
  My vote is no.
• 
  wilwil July 5, 2010 at 7:22pm

  Yeah, i think if we really want to learn Japanese, we must at least think like a japanese <-- though i don't know what does it feels like a japanese LoL.. Romaji is useful at some point at first, but if you want to advance yourself, you should use the 'kana'. Spanz-san already said that, when you mastered the hiragana, you won't need the romaji anymore.. ^^
• 
  beeant July 6, 2010 at 5:23pm

  I can understand if some user only want to know Japanese words to be able to speak Japanese. but I think it is difficult to know the words without knowing hiragana and katakana.
  
  there are many examples, I will take one easy example like.
  
  1.
  pronunciation of a in English and あ(a) in Japanese is different.
  so if you are an English speaking, when you read tabemasu, you may read it as teibmeisu or something like that. this is kind of silly example, maybe I am sure pronunciation of different letter system can happen, so maybe other users can give better examples.
  
  2.
  in more advance level, you need to be able to read in Kanji, because Japanese words have many similar words.
  for example
  かみ (kami)
  紙　髪　神
  three of these are read the same (kami), and same pronunciation, but three of these have completely different meaning
  paper, hair and god.
  
  3.
  Japanese is not a major language like English. so if you want to practice or bring your Japanese to the next level by reading Japanese texts, then you will mostly and maybe always find Japanese text in hiragana, katakana and kanji. there are only few or almost none of Japanese texts are written in romaji.
  
  I hope this can change your thinking of starting to learn Japanese from hiragana/katakana.
  I will be happy to consider any of your idea to implement any good feature to help you learn hiragana/katakana.
  
  Thank You,
  bn
• 
  Ryumatori July 6, 2010 at 11:50pm

  Oh my gosh lol I was the same way like almost 2 months ago. But...I realized
  that by learning the Hirigana and Katakana, I can now understand what "かみ" for example as Bn said translates to into romaji because of the time I put into trying to learn the Kata and Hira. Here is another example --&gt; チョコレート which in romaji translates into Chokoreto. See where I am getting at?
• 
  AyaneKAi July 8, 2010 at 9:25am

  i agree that we dont want constant romaji, however in sertain cases like the hirigana/ katakana lessons i feel it would help to have more of it. It would help some people to pronounce.
  Otherwise we will only be able to read and our pronounciatoin will be crapy.
  Pronouncing the words is one of the most important things to me!
  
  
• 
  StonerPenguin July 9, 2010 at 11:41am

  Ummm "Otherwise we will only be able to read and our pronunciation will be crappy." would never be the case... Reading from romaji and kana gives you the same sounds, if anything your pronunciation from romaji would be worse. I think you might not really understand what we're talking about but eh, I hate to sound mean... :/ You know each kana character represents a syllable that can (basically) only be pronounced one way, right?