Japanese, The Spoken Language

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1. bitwizeMar 2024
   I recognize Kunrei-shiki as the style used in Eleanor Harz Jorden's seminal Japanese textbook, Japanese: The Spoken Language. I always thought Hepburn style was more appropriate for the goals of that book: to convey spoken Japanese in a way understandable to English speakers. But I think Jorden intended for accompanying audio materials to supply a pronunciation guide. (My Japanese professor was a native speaker, and so used her own voice, not audio materials accompanying the textbook.)
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2. TheRealPomaxAug 2016
   Although I should point out those are a different kind of book: these books, with associated workbooks, are for guiding you through learning Japanese at a slow and steady pace. That's super useful, but not what a grammar is about.

   my book is more an encyclopeadia of the grammatical constructions used in Japan, organized by broad category, which you can cherry pick parts of to supplement whatever topics you're covering in your regular course work, or leaf through when you want to refresh your understanding of the grammar.

   Books like Nakama, Genki, Japanese: the spoken language, etc. are great (although I don't like how many of these books don't use hiragana after the first few weeks), and then having a cheap grammar (this one's free, or $30 at most if you want a copy you can leaf through) alongside it only helps you get a deeper insight into the learning you're doing in your school or university course, or even your spare time.

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3. rgrieselhuberSep 2009
   Reminds me of Japanese: The Spoken Language, which is what I used to learn Japanese. It's quite challenging at first but I can't think of a better way for an adult to learn the language well.
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4. patio11Aug 2009
   Candidly, I wouldn't.

   If you put a gun to my head I'd say find yourself a copy of Japanese the Spoken Language with the CDs and drill them until your ears bleed. In particular, make sure you practice production (i.e. talk, talk, talk, if you don't sound like the CD keep talking until you do, then drill some more). The lack of somebody to tell you "You're saying everything... wrong" is one of the largest problems with self-study.

   The largest is that almost everyone gives it up.

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5. ue_Dec 2016
   >Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder.

   This is the exact problem with learning Japanese using roumaji (rouma ji = roman character; ローマ字), because you of course start to read the latin script with your starting accent (assuming of course your first language is written using the latin alphabet).

   However some textbooks persist with using it, despite being excellent otherwise (Japanese: The Spoken Language being one). I can't stress enough the need to move off reading Latin characters. It is also useful to learn the characters by sound rather than their roman equivalents. i.e instead of learning that ロ is "ro", you could learn it by listening: https://youtu.be/aLEtZ2CRoho?t=1m53s

   The mental association is everything.

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6. resoluteteethAug 2016
   Even if research has shown advantages to waiting to teach the writing system, this approach has become extremely unpopular, to say the least. There are only one or two places still using the textbook "Japanese: The Spoken Language," and all other modern textbooks teach the writing system from the beginning.

   Even textbooks that used to use romanized Japanese for fairly logical pragmatic reasons, like "Japanese for Busy People," which is aimed specifically at busy adults who are trying to learn the spoken language in the least amount of time/effort, have been rewritten to eliminate romanized Japanese! Many people studying Japanese go so far as to consider the presence of romanized Japanese, even in combination with normal written Japanese, a black mark against a book, a viewpoint which I think is a bit extreme.

   Additionally, even if there is a benefit to early spoken fluency, it's going to really annoy students when after two years they suddenly have to start learning the writing system from the very beginning. With this approach, students wouldn't be able to use any modern instructional or reference materials for 2-3 years. Basically, they wouldn't be able to study on their own at all.

   Also, from the standpoint of practical language instruction, since many students drop out of Japanese classes the second they're asked to learn hiragana (much less katakana and kanji), it is much more efficient for all parties involved to have this occur earlier in the process.

   Many people studying Japanese as a foreign language actually also 1) find it very discouraging to discover that they can't read words they know because they haven't been taught the characters, and 2) find it very difficult to parse romanized Japanese since it is harder to tell where words end and distinguish particles/verb endings from nouns and verb stems.

   http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580

   > The problem was that all of my language teachers insisted that I memorize hundreds of characters right from the very start.

   For every person who is mad that that they were made to learn kanji from the beginning, there is another who thinks their Japanese ability was permanently impaired by not being taught kanji early enough (I have met plenty of the latter). Regardless of the method, there are people who are going to object to it.

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