At J-List, we like to support our readers who want to learn Japanese, whether it’s tackling the basics for a better understanding of what makes the language tick or trying to go far beyond that. One bit of advice I throw out often is, try to avoid textbooks or other study aids that write Japanese in romaji, that is, in the Roman alphabet, rather than hiragana, katakana and kanji characters. Learning to read Japanese properly will help your pronunciation — I can tell if someone learned Japanese properly starting with hiragana or via a Romanized Japanese textbook by the way they pronounce words like ichi man (“10,000”), with the former using the proper pronunciation of mahn (with a long vowel) and the latter like the English word “man” (short vowel). The meanings carried by kanji is also something you just can’t reduce to the Roman alphabet. In words like shoshinsha (beginner), shobosha (a fire truck) and Shueisha (the publisher of Shonen Jump), the sha character at the end has the same pronunciation, and might seem to be related somehow. But when you study kanji, you see the first sha is “person” (also read mono), the second sha is any kind of vehicle (also read kuruma), and the third is “company.”
