Why You Should Learn Japanese Using Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji

When I was at Narita last week I went into a bookshop to browse for Japan-related books we might want to carry on the site. I picked up one book on Japanese grammar but put it back on the shelf immediately, as it was a book I knew I’d never want to sell on J-List. The reason was that the book taught Japanese using romaji, that is Romanized Japanese, or Japanese sentences written using the English alphabet rather than hiragana, katakana and kanji. The reason learning from a book that teaches you through Romanized Japanese is bad is that your brain has difficulty separating the rules of English pronunciation from Japanese, and this will greatly harm your ability to speak the language naturally. Near J-List there’s a river called the Tone River, pronounced “toh-nay,” but if you learn the name through romaji rather than proper written Japanese because you might pronounce it “tone” like the English word. In English we have “silent e” on the ends of many words, which the Japanese call “the magic e” (maho no E) by the way, but this would get in the way of saying the family name of Mami Tomoe from Madoka Magika correctly (it’s toh-mo-eh, not toh-mo). Finally the number 10,000 is used in Japanese a lot, since it’s the basic unit in the Sino-Japanese numeric system, but if you read ichi man in Romanized Japanese you’re likely to pronounce it like “itchy man” rather than “ee-chi mahn.” This is why we recommend books like the Genki series and White Rabbit kanji cards which force your brain to learn properly using kana and kanji, or books that at least offer both on the page, like the Hello Kitty bilingual guide book we posted today.