Learn Japanese without learning the Characters?! | Romaji 🇯🇵
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- Опубліковано 12 вер 2022
- This is a common question. What do you think?
I think it is possible to learn with Romaji to a certain extent, but it will PREVENT YOU from…
✅ Getting the right pronunciation
✅ Reading everything in Japanese (once you step into Japan, most things are written in hiragana, katakana, and kanji.)
✅ Getting the meaning of words
Romaji is just the closest sound in English but not exactly how Japanese is pronounced. There are lots of sounds that Japanese and English don’t share. For example, the English sounds “L”, “R”, “TH”, and “F” don’t exist in Japanese.
And since we have a limited number of phonetics, a lot of words use the same sounds, for example,
Shoojoo (症状 - しょうじょう) :symptoms
Shoojoo (賞状 - しょうじょう) : certificate (paper)
And there are more disadvantages to learning Japanese with Romaji.
If you are starting, start from Hiragana and Katakana. So you will get the right pronunciation 😉 And you’ll be on the right track to learning Japanese!
If you’d like to start from 0 background and want guidance, check out my beginner course from the link below! I will guide you through how to start learning Japanese in the right way 🇯🇵
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#shorts #nihongodekita #japanese #日本語 #nihongo #learnjapanese #studyjapanese #howtospeakjapanese
![Japanese Listening Practice With A Story (Informal) #3 | Tournament [Intermediate]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nYc-6Xt32bk/mqdefault.jpg)
Me learning hiragana: yess let's goooo
Me learning katakana: oh alright
Me learning kanji: 💀💀💀💀💀
FR, I CANT WRITE KANJI, HIRAGANA AND KATAKANA ARE EASIER FOR ME.
I REMEMBER HAVING TO WRITE AS A CHILD KNOWING ENGLISH AND JAPANESE AND CRYING AT THE TABLE OVER KANJI AS MY MOM WAS LIKE "ERI I DIDNT NOT NAME YOU TO BECOME AN ARTIST SO THAT YOU COULD NOT EVEN HAVE NICE WRITING. FIGURE IT OUT"
POV : you learnt Chinese before learning kanji 😅
@@Sean-The-Monkey no I don't know mandarin
@@Sean-The-Monkey
Me:
I was born to know Chinese-
Pure Katakana texts are just pure hell 😭
そうですか
Kanji: 👀
@@calicobagels nah Kanji is good to me because it helps me differentiate what's what. Instead of reading には like????
Agreed
@@mastermindVMS hai!!!
Duolingo learners be like: i know how to order green tea,rice,water and sushi!
Lol
fr
So true
O cha to mizu kudasai!
@@yajurraghavan4193 green tea water please
Learning Japanese was just gonna be my hobby,but now I'm learning it's gonna be my 24/7 😭
5 month check point, how's the progress going? 上手になりましたか？
@@iamrom Other then a few sentences,no. Sorta gave up 2 months in🥲
@@Yourfavoritemessah 😭
That’s learning any language.
I was gonna give up but duo kidnapped my family and won’t give them back until I can speak fluent Japanese :(
She wanted to learn Japanese without the characters, but she ended up learning the characters without Japanese
Exactly
No because that all loan English words that are actually japanese that's why they are writing in katakana.. 20% of japanese is loan words
@@Juju4me you could say that about any language
@@Juju4me Around 50% of Japanese words are loan words, which is pretty much the same amount of loan words in Mandarin, Korean, French, Spanish...
According to Joseph M. Williams, over 70% of English words are loan words.
Only languages that remained isolated for long periods have 10-20% loan words i.e. Icelandic, Hawaiian.
@@_console you probably know this, since you brought it up, just adding on to what you said for clarification to any potential reader:
w/r/t Icelandic, it's not exactly a case of isolation. rather it's a deliberate policy in place since the 18th century which aims to keep the language as "pure" as possible, so to speak. loanwords are replaced by new combinations of already existing words. it's a pretty interesting and rare case of politics successfully achieving such a major, long-lasting language reform.
When you're able to read it and feel proud of yourself
Then remember you still have a long way to go
The peopole who ask if they can learn Japanese without reading at all are just so lazy and want to skip everything well guess who is never learning a language
Fr
Facts
Exactly
Still a long way to go my ass. Knowing Katakana + Hiragana means you're ready to start learning the language.
As someone in intermediate level Japanese, my professor claims that we need to work on our Katakana more since we use so much hiragana and kanji. So, yes, I think it’s important to learn ALL the writing systems to get a good grasp of the language. They use so many foreign words that is written in Katakana.
i remember when i attempted to learn Japanese on my own. I barely studied to write any katakana and somehow 6 years later, I can still read and write most of them. Hiragana too, I forgot all the kanji i learned except the basic ones like 日 and 月.
@@endergamer.mp4you can remember anything with enough repition. earlier this morning i realized that i had still memorized the specific hand signs for Fireball Jutsu and Chidori (not sure if thats accurate) almost six years later. im telling you, repetition (and in my case, muscle memory) does wonders.
Learning Japanese characters has been a struggle but so worth it in the long run!
The good news, learning ends with death.
@@casualweekday-ytshadowbang2469how's that good news wtf 😭
@@maxien101 皮肉
@@casualweekday-ytshadowbang2469 I like this quote, so grim but true.
me when pure katakana text exists and two kumon teachers are yelling at you to read it because it’s like english but more japanese 😭😭😭
kumon 😭 rip u
Hold up Kumon never taught me Japanese, they just taught me how to sob and cry over homework
Kumon... Gosh. But I have Chinese instead. It's hell
@@danielalt7054 Depends where you live
@@ananonymousanemone4125 CA, they only taught me math and english ;-;
I genuinely thought I’d have a advantage at learning kanji since my first language was Chinese, I was very wrong 😭
Asap native english speaker I would definitely say you still have the advantage, but that doesn't make japanese any easier!
Yeah, when language evolves sometimes cultures will prefer one synonym over the other. Ex: Japanese prefer 夢 for Dream and rarely use 梦, Simplified Chinese uses 梦 and Traditional Chinese uses 夢. Japanese uses a lot of Traditional Hanzi that aren't taught in mainland China, so I can see where you'd struggle
Funny enough as native English that learned a little mandarin, I was loving that most of the time the kanjis keep the same meaning, even if I can't pronounce the kanji I can at least interpret it.
Granted I'm not super good at either language, so this may only hold true for beginner levels..
“ 日文真难学，耗我一灯油” ～梁启超
Welcome to the world of Kunyomi and Onyomi xD
Kanji : hey yo wassup 😂
As a person trying to learn Japanese via doulingo I feel this on 😅
Hey i just started, did you stick with it and i was not going to learn the writing because i just want it for anime and the occasional movie/music but now im thinking i have to learn these characters if i want to get good ..
@@trounbyfireJapanese has two many homophones. Learning how to write is advised.
@@ofidiotabagista5259 well i just hit a wall and yea im going back to learn
I am in the middle of it too, but it still feels like I will never get to a decent level. That being said, from my experience I think you should probably think about diversifying your learning after beating Duolingo`s 8 Rookie levels. Studying kanji radicals is of some help to guess the meaning of kanji you do not know. Also actually studying grammar is way way better then trying to guess it by what Duolingo shoves down your throat.....
@@jeancanestri5572 well Duolingo was just the base before i went to anki to lean vocabulary. It was going fine until i tried to keep up with the leagues... i had way to many new words at once. Then i said ill go back to learn the characters and now i forgot even more stuff so i think i will start over on Duolingo.
sometimes i think i almost get japanese and then i remember kanji still exists 😭
as a Chinese speaker, I'm writing the fucking constitution of the United States to say I walked my dog yesterday
Kanji for kids with the small katakana on top is pretty nice.
There are more kanji than stars in the universe lol
By effective definition, all emoji are functionally equal to kanji.
(I still find it hilarious that △ has actual grammatical meaning)
@@raspberryjam bro... my entire world view has just been changed :O never gonna be the same after this
For anyone who reads this, please save yourself from a massive headache and don't learn or rely on the romanization spelling or pronunciation. I'm learning Korean, and my pronunciation is awful because I learned by comparing the Korean alphabet to the English alphabet. For example, some UA-cam videos might teach you that ㄴ is n in English, but it's absolutely not. There is no ㄴ sound in English, it's just its own unique pronunciation that you have to learn.
My advice is try to learn the Japanese with the mindset of it being your first language, like how a baby learns a language. Comparing one language to a different one will only cause you problems in the long term, especially with pronunciation.
This isn't a fair comparison because Korean is phonetic. So of course you should just skip the romanisation or any other script, because it isn't needed.
Compare that to Chinese (I have no experience, but I imagine Japanese as well because they yoinked the same characters) and you literally cannot learn how to say the character without learning some other script.
Not sure what they use to do this in Japanese, but in Chinese it's pinyin.
Children in China learn pinyin before they learn the characters!
So, just weep for us character learners. (But mostly weep for Japanese learners, damn, pick a writing system lol)
I speak spanish, so for us is very easy since japanese has no new sounds for us. Very easy to the ear.
Depends on your language. Finnish shares almost all of its syllables with japanese, which is why we have many common words (they just mean different things). Most of the syllables are also said the same with minor differences, so its very easy for a finn to learn to pronounce japanese and opposite way around. Biggest difference is how we pronounce R and its still completely understandable.
I have a learning disability but wanted to still learn japanese before visiting the country. So I mostly memorized and learned with romaji, as I wanted to be respectful to the people there even though it was a struggle for me. I did what I could and in my case it meant not learning katakana/kanji, but to be able to have a minor conversation, be polite and respectful and ask for help. It was a wonderful experience to speak japanese in Japan and Im glad I was able to learn with romaji.
@@MisterFro9 *sigh* no. Japanese is phonetic. Literally hiragana and katakana are phonetic writing systems, which can be used to write entire books. Children’s books are written entirely in hiragana. Japanese children don’t start learning kanji until 1st grade and even by 6th grade, they still have a long way to go to mastering the 2136 taught in school.
Until 1894, Korean was written using Chinese characters, Hanja, as well.
Why not abolish kanji? That has been discussed in the early days of the occupation when the reduced list of kanji for daily use was published in 1946 and further simplification would take place in the 50’s. Ultimately… while a pain to learn, a page of pure hiragana is hard to read (understand). Japanese contains quite a number of homophones and spacing between words isn’t normally used. So I’d describe as something like kanji makes Japanese easier to understand and adds a kind of flavor to the text.
ㄴ is n but with a twist of "d". It's fine if you use just the n sound.
In less then a minute you explained to me why the English names in anime are so strange, thank you :)
I learned Japanese completely without learning the characters first. I spoke Japanese everyday and after some day I was like ”let's go learn the characters too!” and then I learned the characters as well.✨
Yeah I don't understand what people are talking about. Just learn it like a child. Listen and speak first, read and write later.
It's remarkable how Japanese children only begin speaking after you teach them how to read.
No😂 They can speak before learning characters.
yo
^ This, I know for a fact you can speak a language without knowing how to read it
クソほど嘘で笑ったわ
You can speak a language without knowing how to write it that's how so many kids learn
Yea been here living, part timing and studying 3 years. When two natives speak and they start swallowing syllables, using shortened versions of words or omitting articles or something else or god forbid using slangs or regional variant of words - like “ticklish” is one word in Tokyo but another in Kyoto… can’t understand nuthing
Xạo tró
@@tranquocthanh949 🤨?
That's the story of my English as well. Took me 23 years to feel done as a learner because all the ways people change the language and to understand all kinds of foreign accents and slang and perfect my pronounciation and who knows what. The journey was long.
@@AmbiCahira amen
I thought only 擽ったい is ticklish ?? 😭😭
Exactly. It's like katakana and hiragana are essential for your pronunciation development.
Will say not necessarily. How I began learning Japanese was listening to Japanese. The sounds are more the etymology, and give you the breakdowns.
Whilst you learn more about Japanese by these, it is not a requirement to know how to speak the language. Honestly, if you pay attention to how the language is spoken, you can pick up how it's spoken without the written
I know, I did it
Not really. You can actually do that pretty well with Rōmaji when you are getting started... as long as you use Hepburn and not kunrei-shiki. If you start with Kana, you’ll get pretty confused and annoyed whenever you stumble with words that have long O’s but you see a Kana U you are not supposed to pronounce but then a verb conjugation appears and is written exactly like that other word but this time you are actually supposed to pronounce that U.
😊i have actually learnt how to talk with people in japanese without learning characters, its definitely easier than learning it with characters, did thar only because my friends are speaking japanese and mostly just texting english
yes but learning to read and write is important too
@@Vocarotoki no one said it wasn't
Yeah, well said. It's way more important honestly
@@jama211 depends what is your goal. If you goal is simply to talk to someone in Japanese or understand the majority of a show, it's fine not to learn how to write, even if you're going to have some troubles with more complex aspect of the conversation and limit yourself to oral interactions. But this video is discouraging the use of romaji as a shortcut for not learning the rest, not saying you absolutely need to learn how to write. Learning a language like Japanese and relying on romaji is horrible for the pronunciation, mora, and pitch. How do you read "hashi"? Is it 箸? or 橋? Both have different pitch accents and unless you can guess which one it is from the context, you wouldn't know how to read it correctly. How do you pronounce long vowels without knowing what is a mora and how tightly it fit with their writing system if all you do is read and write latin characters (it's less of a problem if you have access to native interactions but still). And since the language is so contextual, attempting to read a normal text in romaji (or even pure kana) without kanji can quickly turn into a nightmare due to all the homophones. The text would need to be overly explicit and unnatural just so you could understand the context. Spoken and written Japanese can be different like that.
My first trip to Japan I met my 3-year old niece. She was really nice and welcoming in the way only toddlers are, and at one point in the visit she asked me to read her one of her children's books.
It *was* all hiragana and katakana, which I knew, but I wasn't exactly the most fluid reader. Actually, I was pretty stilted and sometimes only recognized words long after I'd sounded them out, so I didn't get any pacing or the "voice" right.
I asked her if it was good and interesting, and she slowly just shook her head. I remember her little eyes staring up at me as thought she'd just realized that I was mentally handicapped, while her older sister and mom were rolling on the floor laughing over in the other corner.
Cool story ☺️
Let’s be real though - children books are the worst!
I have a degree in Japanese studies. I learned to read fucking newspapers and academic articles - but the first time a kid asked me to read this really short pre-school picture book … I was soooo lost 🤣.
(At least when you read it for the first time and don’t know the text yet 😉).
Oof
@@missis_jo1017 how so? is it because children's book only has the kana and no kanji?
@@frjuy
Yes. They are usually written in hiragana and often don’t have spaces between the words. So as a non-native it can be difficult to determine where a word starts and ends.
_mentally cries_
Katakana and Kanji les go 🥲🥲🥲
Learning that katakana and kanji are hell why can't we just use hiragana ;-;
me who knows chinese and can only read some japanese if its the same character as chinese 🤡
@@daegaliii honestly I don't know how the hell china teaches kids to speak Chinese if it's all kanji or similar to kanji. You just like... memorize the words??? Is there a formula??? I'm confused??
Katakana is easy but Kanji... 🥲 難しい
@@dontburstmybubble686 yeah we just have to memorize the characters 😭😭
but theres a way to somewhat get the meaning of a character you dont know, which is looking at the characters it’s made up with (the radical)
for example, 淉’s radical is the three dashes next to 果
this radical symbolizes 水 which means water
so 淉 (juice)’s meaning has something to do with water
but yeah its a bit complicated LOL 😭
I've been learning japanese since january this year as a way to do somrthign productive with my free time and if you're actually willing to put in an effort to learn the alphabets, you can actually get pretty far in just 5 months. I've got hiragana down and am currently learning phrases, words and grammar with it. Just one out of three but still, it's crazy fun to actually see progress with such a hard language. : )
😂😂😂 5 months and u only now learning to speak? That's precisely my point
@@valeriewinter6217 there is a lot to unpack here.
1. I have about 10 minutes of free time per day. That is not much time to learn an entire language. Due to the fact that I can hold a basic conversation by now is a huge accomplishment.
2. Japanese is the 4th language I am learning. I have also studied German and French extensively and am able to speak both languages fluently.
3. It seems to me like you are jealous. Alone by looking at the fact that your english isn't really that great tl be honest, I can discern that you have an inferiority complex. Maybe you should have therapy to get this fixed. ; )
Get a grip on your life, Karen. ; )
Do you have any tips to remember the order? I know vowel wise it goes "a, I, u, e, o", but after the "t" group I lose the order.
@@celestewoodworth5627 I never took the time to be honest. I just copied the table until I memorized Hiragana. : )
@@platinum_ink Ah well. Thanks anyhow. Have a good week!
it can be hard but its worth the pride once you achieve it! I can read hiragana and katakana comfortably and am currently collecting kanji
The way katakana is lowkey the hardest to read 💀 my Japanese professor was so perplexed by why our whole class was so bad at katakana because she thought it should be the easiest to learn since it’s so angular. I think we were bad at it because you see it least in reading samples so they just kind of left our minds fastest
I think this too. it's infuriating even when I can read it I just can't relate it to English words
Huh?- it was super easy for me how would it be harder than kanji?-
I just started learning Japanese. I can kinda remember some katakana just because of some characters' name, but I'm so bad at memorising hiragana. I can't remember them even after I wrote pages of notes. I'm just so bad at memorising curve characters, the angular katakana really a lot easier for me to memorise. And as a Chinese, understanding kanji is not a big problem for me. More like I had always been relying on kanji to guess the contents. I can't read hiragana nor katakana, so I can only read kanji. Also, I believe after I memorised all the katakana, my understanding will improve a lot since katakana are basically for English words, so if I can recognise and pronounce it, I will eventually understand what the words mean.
I found it difficult because some of the characters look the same in katakana and hiragana, but not all of those are pronounced the same way in both scripts. it becomes a nightmare trying to memorize both, it's like if someone showed you a typed "t" vs how we actually write "t" on paper and then went "this one's pronounced T, but the other one is pronounced S."
I’ve been self studying and katakana is soooo hard because of the fact that it’s not used that much.
Gaijin Sayaka: Do you think I can learn Japanese without learning the characters?
Sayaka: の。
Underrated comment.
aggree
How about
Sayaka:「ノ。」
Sayaka: 飲 (now get me a drink).
ノー！
@@lilli7040
her handwriting is so nice
Learning the characters was the easiest part for me, though, It took some effort. Im still working on expanding my vocabulary. Never give up friends. Im rooting for you!
I can read Russian and Katakana and Hiragana. Only problem is I still don't understand what I'm reading. :D
Same here with Hangeul 한글
@@mnurdin08 same reading hangul is soo easy but i dont understand a thing 😅
@@mnurdin08 It's funny that I can read Hangeul by watching Running Man
Exactly same, as I'm studying both Russian and Japanese lol
you mean cyrillic
Not me accidentally learning hiragana from music
And then I just decided to learn Japanese
....huh
How the fuck do you learn hiragana from listening to music?
@@joannis46678 I look at the lyrics
Yeah slowly but surely getting there through music. Memory is bad so I look at them occasionally (and to learn when/ why characters like ka turn to ga) but mostly learning the same way atm
@@joannis46678 you listen to a song and can hear some of the syllables clearly enough to link a character to it. From there you also recognise words/phrases and link the characters and start to get a basic grasp of hiragana through listening
writing even one character in kanji makes u a freaking artist
ありがとう for teaching people who are like that
ngl I find reading katakanas so fun. They’re like kind of riddles lmao they’re my favorite. Of course kanjis comes last 😆
Kinda late but hiragana is the first one to learn
Yeah agree!
When I'm in Japan, sometimes I read things in katakana and it takes me a sec to realize what English words they are or even that they are English words in the first place. For example, menus are commonly filled with katakana.
@@chaelia_loveeI don't get when to use those. Like how do ppl normally use it?? Does ppl mix those three together? Or each one is meant for different things?
@@t_t860
For all I know is Katanaka is for foreign words and foreign names. While kanji is used for a whole word.
I recently memorized katakana and hiragana but I still take a long time to read it, it's like singing the alphabet just to get the right letter
I get the same reading Korean. I have no problem sounding out what I read, but _quickly..?_ Nope.
the same for me, its been a month since I'm memorizing ひらがなとカタカナ and it takes me a lot of time to read it but it's a matter of practicing
がんべてましょ！
use flash cards. helps a lot.
@@omarramosali2998 no Its just hard to recall all of hiragana characters and the katakana to
You have to input more words. Try graded readers with a audio. Helps so much with fluency. Unfortunately there is no other way than to read, write, and speak it.
I could read all of it but I got hung up on Lamborghini lmao
It was pretty easy ngl
You can surely reach an intermediate level in Japanese speaking without knowing the characters.
I am fluent in Japanese. My mother did not make me learn the characters.
I studied them on my own but from lack of use I forgotten most of them.
I still read a few kanji and a few hiragana and katakana.
Japanese was also the first language I spoke at home.
I just wish my mother would have allowed me to attend Japanese preschool to learn hiragana and katakana.
When I was 4 years old I was enrolled in an English-speaking preschool so I could better speak English because my father couldn't communicate with me.
You are not fluent in Japanese if you can't read and write in Japanese. The writing language is part of language. You are at the best just good at spoken Japanese.
If you can't read any Kanji, you won't understand many Japanese homophones jokes that involving miss-reading the Kanji character.
@@faustinuskaryadi6610 how to read Japanese to know homophones.
There are people in Japan that I literate that know those things as well.
@@ernestestrada2461 literacy rate in Japan is about 90%, so it's actually just in your dream that you don't need to learn written Japanese to be fluent in Japanese.
Prof Kiyomi Yamashita from Nihon Daigaku (I was her interpreter when she visited Indonesia in 2015) said Japan is 読書文化 (I don't know how to translate it to English). To have deep conversation in Japanese, learning the written language is important like English speakers who have sophisticated vocabulary are mostly the one who can read classical literatures or academic journals. If you just want to be tourist, of course spoken Japanese is enough. But for working in Japan, know written Japanese is very important.
@@faustinuskaryadi6610 I did study in junior high and High School so I do have understanding of kanji.
Because I haven't kept up with reading and writing doesn't mean I don't understand cultural aspects.
Myself being discriminated various races your comments smacks of superiority complex .
I grew up during a time in Japan when there are people that would say very cruel things to you.
I'm not going to repeat them but just because I don't read high-level doesn't mean I don't understand the language for the culture.
What you're doing sounds a lot like what's happening us with cancel culture.
@@ernestestrada2461 Like it or not Japanese is quite racist to non-Japanese even half-Japanese are discriminated if you watch UA-camr Nobita from Japan.
Honestly why Im focusing on recognizing kanji and their meaning, because to many text books go by hiragana or romanji (although i would always convert the romanji into hiragana), or they take to long to get to kanji lessons and it does not help me learn at all. When I started focusing on kanji after hiragana, I found myself spotting words more and being able to guess what some words mean when I spot them in like a twitter post or something.
Now im trying to look for vocab and kanji in books or graded readers i own to teach myself to read.
I got u, learn natively is a website that sorts books by their rough jlpt level
I recommend tanoshii japanese, ot has lots of kanji practice
I recommend using wanikani, their spaced repetition system is really effective! I stopped learning a few years ago and I still remember quite a lot of what I learnt with it
Thank you so much ma'am
I was in doubt in this and you cleared it! ❤
I am currently working on hiragana and I was proud of myself, that is, until I saw this video...
ランボルギーニってやばくかっこいいと思う
たかいですね
やばくかっこいいは草
Japanese doesn't have 3 character systems though, it has 5. Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, Romaji, and Arabiasuuji. As shown in the video, romaji isn't for English speakers to write Japanese, it's for Japanese people to write Latin letters. Arabiasuuji is just the "normal" numbers for us, but it's a completely different system for them.
Hold up....Latin?? So you gotta know Japanese and Latin? I most likely misunderstanding something here....
@@rueondsinn4548 Yeah, they mean the alphabet used to write English and many other languages around the world. It's called the Latin alphabet because it was first used to write Latin (although most of the letters come from other, older alphabets).
@@timschowalter6308 ok, that makes a lot more sense, thanks for clearing that up!
why is it called arabiasuuji?
@@kane9673 suuji 数字 = “number characters”
Romanji, Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji. GOOD LUCK~♡
TBF their writing system is pretty easy to learn but it's the native sounds that trip me up.
The fact that I was able to pause and read that katakana writing made my day😭✨
you definitely can though if you don't care about being able to read or write, which some people can want and there's nothing wrong with that. everybody has their own goals and learns languages for their own reasons
While I agree and know it's possible, it's far from ideal. Somehow, and it's very weird, knowing the kanji behind a word means a lot. It helps understand origin, meaning and similarity to other concept. You'll bump into that even without learning the Kanji, but it's so much harder to explain then.
(I wish I could skip the Kanjis, really, just to be able to speak, but it doesn't get you far enough. Still can be "decent" proficiency.)
@@mickaelsflow6774 sounds like a stupid language then
@@smokingirishman7820 if you say so
@@smokingirishman7820 its literally the same way for english. Root words. Dingus.
@@mickaelsflow6774 not just that, a lot of Japanese words are homonyms (they sound the same but mean completely different things) and the only way to discern between meanings in some written contexts is via kanji (similarly to how many words in English sound the same but are spelled differently). Writing in hiragana or katakana only makes it very difficult to communicate in depth as it vastly limits the scope of what you’re saying in this type of language too.
Me: learns all of Katakana and hiragana *happy*
Finds out about the millions of kanji characters. : *w h a t* 🤠
What's hana? Flower? Nose?
@@ctrlzme.6448 I think they meant hiragana? I'm quite unsure as well
@@loriines i think they wanted to say hiragana but shortened it to hana lol
I think kana, the joint name of hiragana and katakana, just skipping two keys over from k to h
@@ctrlzme.6448 the study book I used said hana is katakana and hiragana. Looks like it was wrong lol
I just started learning hiragana and katakana like a week ago, and it's amazing how much easier it is to understand the differences, and understand what's being written/said.
For those learning Japanese: no pain no gain
**literally doesn’t get the point because brain empty**
Same and I somewhat know the logic of Japanese but this short makes no sense 😭
Nah took me a few minutes too.
Basically, her sentence was not an "English" sentence. It used Japanese characters and their pronunciations. Though she used English grammar on the sentence for the comedic effect ("I think Lamborghini is freakin' cool"), obviously that's not a correct way to convey a Japanese sentence.
Imagine if a Japanese person wrote a letter "in English" to you, but used all katakana, just like the video. Correct English grammar but katakana characters. It's gonna sound sort of like English, if read out loud by that Japanese person. But to our brains, that ain't English we're reading.
If you tried to write a letter to them "in Japanese," with correct Japanese grammar but all in romaji, the Japanese person would understand little of it. Unless they know how to read the Roman alphabet and voice its phonetics.
Therefore, all Japanese language learners, buckle down and learn their writing systems.
@@unknowndeoxys00 big brain time
Romaji just sounds and looks Japanese it isn't Japanese
shes saying that, for example, writing 8-5-12-12-15(romanji substitute) to spell "hello(in japanese characters)" is so wrong
I wanted to learn Korean and now I ended up here-
Mood. Might say fuck my mental health and try to learn both
I wanna learn both
@@dontburstmybubble686 frfr
Come to the dark side.
Wow, i love the fast ending greet. Arigato
It’s ALMOST like saying, “Can I learn English without learning the alphabet?” But the characters are the words. (I think I hope I’m not wrong 😅)
I mean there’s plenty of people who can speak but can’t read. You learn to speak as a child before ever entering school.
So yes you should be able to learn any language without ever leaning the alphabet but it’s obviously hard
So u haven't learnt to speak as a baby until u learned to read???😱 u MUST tell me how it felt like! It seems wild.
PS: that girl is stoopid and wrong. U can learn language without the writing system
@@jasonbfhfj8132it's actually easier, not hard.The only reason it is hard is because all the studying resources we have cater to those who first learned the alphabet
“Can i learn English and not learn the strange spellings? I mean if It can be sounded out they’ll know what I’m saying, right?”
To be fair, that's exactly what a lot of people online seem to think.
Grammar and spelling are rare animals nowadays.
Funny enough your example was exactly the counter example why YOU DONT NEED TO LEARN WRITING.
English is a language were writing and speaking is so disconnected, that you would be fluent faster if you only spoke.
Guess what, EVERY language is only speaking. You dont need writing at all.
So this argument, Japanese is special, you wont understand the language if you are not fluent in the writing system, is utter bullshit.
Learning languages is only speaking. Consume the spoken word and use the spoken word as much as possible. Thats if, bam you are fluent.
@@livinlicious That's a very 1-dimensional way of looking at it. First of all, half of all communication anywhere nowadays is done through text, so not learning how to read basically is the same as not being fluent in most practical regards.
Second, not learning how to read can, ironically, make it much harder to learn spoken language. You will have no visual reference for words you try to learn, making you extremely prone to mishearings, mispronounciations, and misinterpretations. It also greatly limits your study options, effectively cutting off your access to pretty much all of the most effective and proven ways to learn, such as flash cards, SRS, podcast transcriptions, shows with subtitles, etc. So I really don't understand where you're coming from with all of this.
@@jpnpod8277 Being fluent means being able to speak easily, communicating everything that you need to communicate, without having to constantly search for appropriate words. It has nothing to do with being _literate,_ which is a different skill altogether. It is only very recently that widespread literacy has existed at all. Most people throughout history, have lived their entire lives fluently speaking to each other in their native languages without ever being able to read or write at all. And before that, throughout prehistory, literally _everyone_ spoke to each other without reading or writing, because reading and writing simply had not been invented yet!
Your second paragraph makes little sense. You don't need a "visual reference" for a spoken word. You just listen to it. Of course you can mishear words, sometimes. Knowing a writing system will not prevent you from mishearing things. It doesn't help in that regard at all. Unless, perhaps, you are talking about the very specific situation in which you are listening to something and reading it at the same time, in which case, yes, the written text might allow you to compensate for mishearing words by showing you what the words were meant to be. But that is a pretty niche scenario. It is of no help in a real, face-to-face conversation.
As for mispronouncing things, written language will only help you if the language is written perfectly phonetically. And for how many of the big languages is that the case? If you know any language that is not written phonetically - and I'm guessing you do, since you have just posted a comment in one such language - then you will know that the way a word is written can be very misleading in terms of pronunciation. I very often hear non-native speakers of English pronouncing English words how they are written, because they have made the mistake of trying to guess the pronunciation from seeing it written down, rather than listening to it. So it is clear that far from helping you to avoid mispronunciation, writing _causes_ mispronunciation. It is a hindrance in that regard, not a help.
Most people throughout all of history speak their language without knowing how to read or write it.
Everyone starts being able to speak and understand their language well before they have any idea how to read or write it. Learning speaking and listening first is a better and more natural way to learn a language, you're more likely to become properly fluent if you start this way.
I watched this video started learning kana and im so happy that i can now read the sign😊
My favorite is the last few words🤭🤭❤️
Honestly, learning hiragana was the best choice I made. I went from absolute zero to reading hiragana well enough to turn off the romaji on Duolingo within two weeks. I'm now less than two weeks away from a year of daily effort, and I've long since learned katakana as well (after some dedicated effort to do so).
Trying to learn Japanese without at least reading comprehension of hiragana is a fools errand, for certain.
I'm not confident enough to fully _write_ hiragana by hand, but I can do some characters, and really, really recommend it to anyone who is interested.
Japanese is a fun language, even if I know it'll take me many years yet.
wow thats amazing! did you use duolingo only to learn japanese?
4 years later and I still ask myself why I decided to torture myself by learning Japanese.
But hey I managed to get a job here in Tokyo, which is something I've wanted for the longest time so, worth it.
Not really, in my opinion its better to first learn to speak fluently and listen. After that the reading and writing can be learned. Thats how japanese people learned their language. Thats how I learned japanese. After 4 years I was able to speak fluently with very little accent before I started to learn kanji.
@@marvelgeek147 Sorry for the delay! YT never decided to notify me, lol.
In terms of learning to read, yes, I exclusively used Duolingo. I own Genki 1 & 2 + workbooks now, but even then a lot of my focus is on Duo for grammar and vocab. I do watch an absolute boatload of anime to train my ears, and this + other JP YT channels.
427 days straight now and no end in sight. Gonna make this happen!
@@Saroku1000 Good point. I suppose that was just my bias showing. I'm a learner who does better with visualisation, so reading and writing, than by auditory memory. It shows too, because sometimes I'll look at kanji and know exactly the meaning, but sometimes forget the pronounciation for a few seconds. I don't so much forget what a sound means, just which sound to make, so my speech lags.
It's an odd issue to have, but I guess not a terribly bad one. At least I know that's what I need to keep focusing on that and doing better at.
Lamborghini is pretty cool.
WOAHHHH!!!
BLONDE LOOK SUITS YOU SOOO GOOOOD.
Hiragana and katakana are super easy, it’s kanji that’s the REAL hellscape.
As soon as I learned that kanji has multiple meanings and pronunciations(kunyomi and onyomi, i believe), I decided that I wasn't smart enough and quit learning.
after i saw korean pronunciation and arabic grammar and vocabularies, i thought to myself "maybe 3 writing systems and 1000+ kanji isn't so bad"
Care to elaborate
buddy wdym 😭
Yea arabic grammar is supee hard ( coming from a native arab) and sometimes we don't understand alot of words from the old arabic
My parents speak arabic, I can understand them near fluently (i dont understand the names of some like not commonly spoken words like ornament, vase, cauliflower ext) but I cannot for the life of me form a sentence. Recognizing and using grammaf are 2 major things, and a true pain in arabic
they’re saying Korean annunciations and Arabic grammar is hard
“To learn a language is to also agree to abide by all of its rules”
Thing is this girl lies about this language rules.
Cause, you know, I am pretty sure she herself first learn to speak her language, without reading anything lmao
@@valeriewinter6217 she doesn't explicitly say it but when she says "learning Japanese" she means learning to read the language not actually learning to speak the language. In which case it is impossible to read Japanese without learning its scripts. You CAN read Japanese using romanji but nearly no native speaker is going to use it in a serious setting, and it doesn't represent the language as well, in short no one is going to use romanji outside of learning and it'd be a waste of time. If you want to learn how to read Japanese ditch romanji and use the scripts that were created for the language and used by its native speakers for centuries.
Your handwriting is so neat
I've been wandering around for days trying to say itte mitte arigatou as fast as ND says it.
Walls of hiragana make me cry. Thank the spirits for kanji
If you plan on learning Japanese, I highly recommend memorizing the characters (hiragana and katakana both). They don’t actually take that long to memorize. Even a lazy person like myself was able to do it.
then come the kanji one
How about kanji
@@tommybee8181 kanji are a bit harder, but still can learn them reasonably quickly.
In writing, it’s actually easier even for a newbie like me to recognize the kanji than the spelled out hiragana or katakana because many words actually have multiple pronunciations depending on usage cases.
For example, 人 always means person/people but spelled out in hiragana it can be ひと, ジン, or ニン, depending on usage. Add in the fact that Japanese has grammar particles like と and no spaces means kanji actually make things easier, given the present state of the language.
The hiragana and katakana total 92 characters plus some easy combinational rules. Takes maybe a few weeks of memorization exercises to learn. Add as many kanji and the grammar rules, and you can actually understand a decent amount of conversational Japanese already.
@@J7Handle Why did you write "jin" as "ジ ン"??? I was taught that it was either kanji: "人" or hiragana: "じん". Katakana is usually (or maybe only?) for loan words as far as I'm aware. If I am incorrect or misunderstanding you, then please explain this to me.
you got a point
Ever had a headache from someone speaking another language at the speed of light... I have
the rushed "OK THANKS FOR WATCHING!!!" at the end😭
You understood that shit?!
Can you please tell the exact words in Japanese? Really want to know!
@@gauravchopra3677 ching chang chung
Mite Kurete Arigatoo 💛
@@gauravchopra3677 no its ching chang chung!
Japanese was my first language "technically" but I never learned to write it because I grew up in the USA
Try learning it! You’ll be helping keep your culture alive, and chances are you’ll feel proud when you do
Same but I'm Bengali and grew up in England, I can sort of speak and understand it but absolutely can't read or write it
"I think Lamborghini is freaking cool" is the truest statement I've ever heard.
It is possible. My cousin works as an izakaya chef and was born in Japan but raised in London and then he eventually moved back to Japan. He can speak Japanese fluently but has difficulty reading.
One example of why romaji sucks for Japanese is the word 原因＝げんいん for the cause of something. In romaji you'd write it genin, but it's ambiguous whether genin means げんいん or げにん, the first of which is pronounced like gen-yin if the n and y were a little weaker than the English n and y, the second of which is pronounced more like ge-nin.
In romaji, げんいん is written as gen in and, げにん is written as geni n.
@@christiancarrion291 wow ok but I didn’t know about this rule and I think all Japanese people are inadvertently ignorant too
They would probably put gen’in and genin but they don’t always so it’s pretty bad
@@shadowfaxdog9733 Then the person who wrote it is wrong. But yeah, this just gives another example of why is better learning hiragana, katakana and kanji instead of relying in Romaji, also at the end you will be better off because you will enjoy books, etc.
No. That’s what happens when you use what I call false Roumaji. In both kunrei and Hepburn Rōmaji, you would use an apostrophe.
When she first asked I thought she meant just learning the vocal part of the language and I was like "yeah, people can learn their language without learning how to read so why not" but then she mentioned romanji and I got it
i still don't get it :(
@@snow86241 the point is that if you wouldn’t use a Japanese writing system to pronounce/learn English words then you shouldn’t use a Latin writing system to pronounce/learn Japanese words
@@rayyfire5738 to learn how to say words, you definitely should, but not as your primarily transcription (witch should be an IPA-like system) and surely shouldn't use it to write for people, specially natives.
@@rayyfire5738 The funny thing is many Japanese people when they learn English will write the pronunciation in katakana... and it basically sets them into a strong accent that the average English speaker won't understand 😅
@@rayyfire5738 I don't get it ether, I might aswell give up
Honestly learning gana and kana at a basic level only took me about a month, kanji is the hard part but is very necessary due to many different kanji sounding the same phonetically
Without her translating I read: "I think Lamborghini is freaking cool". I've been on duolingo for 263 days now, lol.
Being able to read japanese characters is such a flex.
ikr
But me not being able to translate it.. still a flex I guess.
I think romaji has an easier time representing the sounds in Japanese than katakana does in representing English sounds, but I agree that either way it's bizarre for the speaker of the other language. Just learn the scripts.
It would be bizarre for any speaker of any language if the person they were talking to suddenly held up a piece of paper with text on it instead of just speaking. As much as I respect Sayaka for her excellent videos teaching us about Japanese, this one fell flat.
Just wanted to say that you can absolutely learn to speak a language without learning how to write it. There's something called the IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet, and it has a character/symbol/letter dedicated to every sound that is known to be used in human language. That's a lot, but you don't have to learn all of it. Just the symbols for all the sounds in your native language plus the language you want to learn is plenty. It's completely phonetical and universal to all languages. It allows you to transcribe any speech sounds, so any word from any language, plus if a word is said differently in a different accent, it's written differently in the IPA. This is a great tool to be able to write down your learning and perfect your pronunciation when learning spoken language.
You guys are great!
Never katakana was explained this simply 👌
As soon as I started learning Japanese, my goal was to lose the romaji as quickly as possible. Because even then I knew that being too reliant on it would cause negative affects down the road. I agree 110% do not do this!!!
Romaji is the worse thing to learn the japanese cause if you don t read hiragana katakana and kanji, you won t read absolutely nothing texts during your japanese learning.
Effects
I worked at the library of the Japanese studies department of my university. One time I had a guy come in who told me that he lived in Japan several years and speaks Japanese. He was looking for a special textbook so I told him the code and where he could find it. He came back several times and got very mad at me and rude because he couldn’t find it. Turned out he couldn’t find it because he couldn’t read the hiragana-title on the spine 🤷♀️.
Apparently you can get quite far without any knowledge of Japanese script 😳. To this day I have no clue how he survived 4 years in the Japanese work force without even learning hiragana 🤷♀️.
@@missis_jo1017
Past 4 years in Japan and he couldn't read hiragana ??
How he find a job in Japan without reading just hiragana...
Even if he spoke japanese, we can t stay 4 years in a country without know how to read the language. (I can understand that he didn t read kanji but hiragana...)
@@user-bv4jq6sm9t He probably worked as an English teacher. Or possibly a programmer of some sort, since they might use English to code. When living in Japan I knew people in those two fields who couldn't use much Japanese even after living there awhile (though definitely more common with the teachers).
I remember philosophy class was so boring I was learning Japanese instead from my phone, and now I am good at reading katakana and knows some grammar
Japanese babies learn how to speak japanese first before they start learning japanese characters and they are extremely happy until that time.
Thank you for this video.
That's a kick a needed.
See you soon Sayaka sensei!
you can do this ! don't give up cause of all the characters, you'll be so proud when you can read and translate them >:)
I give up. I wanna learn to hear it and say it. If I have to learn the characters first, i might aswell give up. Visiting Japan is a pipe dream, i might aswell give up my language books too
It's like that image of the girl playing the fire extinguisher saxophone, the differences matter
Haha I feel called out ! I started to understand the way sentences are made and a lot of vocabulary, but learning the hiraganas is just "by heart" type of learning and it's the hardest for me x) but with work, I'll do it 🤞 ! Your videos help a lot so thanks 😁 !
Glad to see a new videos! It feels like a long time between videos
This one is great, love it
To be fair, katakana and hiragana is surprisingly easy
Yeah it only took me like 1 month
currently learning hiragana on duolingo and its stressful seeing whats to come hahaha
Thank you so much haha I feel smarter now straight up
Omg, THANK YOU. I am going to save this video to show the next person who asks me this.
Everyone: talking about KATAKANA
Me: I FREAKING WANT THAT PEN SO BAD
My friend asked me this exact question and this is how I answered
I first started learning Korean and the hangul was quite easy to learn but this one is freaking hard
it's hard to remember hiragana characters when i have short term memory loss and my mind is stuffed with chinese characters, english words, malay words and butt ton of internet bullsht
i dont know any letters from kanji hiragana katagana but i passed n4 talking test 😂😂😂 thanks for animes and audio lessons
yeah, the argument "no japanese without writing system" is complete bullshit. Its not that hard, just talk with people and ask them what you need.
Only the talking test, not the others, because they have kana and kanji... I mean, can you survive in Japan without ever learning kana and kanji? sure, the same way you can survive in the US without ever learning the alphabet, but you would only know how to talk. Is that useful? again, sure, depending on what are your purposes with the language. But is like learning english (or any language) without knowing how to write it and read it, you're illiterate. You can get by with "only anime" and of course you learn a lot of vocabulary that's really helpful and gives you an advantage when you start learning the language compared to people that don't consume much anime or japanese content, but you will never really "know" the language that way. And sure N5 and N4 talking tests would be easy, but I doubt it would be easy from that point onward... and if you only do the talking tests, well, you'll be kinda wasting money just for fun. so,... cool, i guess?
It's ok if you just want to talk with friends but that's all you could do but if you have to read documents,book,warning,signs etc. Well Good luck with that lol
thanks for everyone's opinion and advice i will learn kanji hiragana katakana soon as i have time 🖤
I thought the JLPT don’t have a verbal test.
💯 gotta put in the work
the way I can only read most Katakana and struggle with Hiragana and Kanji makes me rethink my existence 💀💀💀💀
How did I even get to this-
I like ur “mite kurete arigato” :))