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Romaji, Loanwords, and the Quest for "Pure Japanese"
If Amazon.com reader reviews are an accurate indication, it seems that a lot of people these days absolutely abhor any Japanese textbook that uses romaji. I recently came across several reader reviews of Hiroko Storm’s Ultimate Japanese that torpedo the book on the sole grounds that it contains the dreaded Latin letters. And among the wider online Japanese learning community, the tide has definitely turned against romaji-based learning materials. Several popular websites targeted at students of Japanese warn against using any text that employs romaji, on the grounds that it will hobble pronunciation skills and impede students’ progress in learning to read Japanese.
First of all, I agree with the sentiment behind the movement. We English-speakers are far too casual in our approach to foreign languages--- especially those with non-Latin writing systems. Given current trends in geopolitics and international commerce, at least 25% of us should be able to read a newspaper article in Japanese, Chinese, or Arabic. We all know that the percentage of Americans (or Canadians or Brits, for that matter) who can pull this off is closer to .025%. As a group, we English-speakers are lazy linguists.
In one chapter in Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One, I warn students of “exotic” languages not to rely on transliterations. I counsel them to learn to read Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Thai, etc. in the scripts that the native speakers of those languages actually use. So I am all for learning to read as well as speak.
However, I am not entirely sure that transliterations (such as romaji) have no place during the early stages of study. Back when I started learning Japanese (late 1980s), kana-based textbooks were the exception rather than the rule, and almost every textbook included at least some romaji. My first Japanese textbook was Hugo’s Japanese in Three Months, an old standby that can still be found on bookstore shelves. The book provides a very thorough outline of Japanese grammar at the beginner level. I began pouring over it intensely in June during one summer in college. By the time the autumn semester began, I had a working knowledge of basic Japanese grammar.
Of course, Hugo’s Japanese in Three Months makes almost exclusive use of romaji. I didn’t become fully comfortable reading Japanese texts until about one year later. As a beginner, I attacked Japanese grammar and Japanese writing as separate tasks. When I dove into the writing system, I found that my knowledge of Japanese grammatical concepts (which I learned through romaji-based texts) made the acquisition of Japanese reading skills easier. I went on to learn all the standard kanji and then some. After graduation, I enjoyed a fairly successful run as a Japanese translator/interpreter--- despite the fact that I started out with a romaji-based textbook. Nor did my initial reliance on romaji tempt me to rely on it forever. As kanji became second nature for me, my need for romaji fell away like training wheels.
That’s just my experience of course, at a time when learning Japanese in the United States was still a relative novelty. I don’t expect that Japanese pedagogy in 2005 should be the same as it was back in 1988 or 1990. Hopefully the new emphasis on diving into the Japanese writing system from the get-go reflects a new seriousness on the part of students.
I would, however, urge students not to disregard a classic text like Makino & Tsutsui’s Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, which contains authentic Japanese text and romaji. As one Amazon reviewer of Gene Nishi’s Japanese Step by Step noted, Japanese text written with furigana pronunciation guides is as much of a “crutch” as romaji:
..furigana is the phonetic transcription of kanji but the 2000 kanji deemed necessary for daily life are rarely if ever written with furigana (only for kids in kids books). you can’t read real japanese and rely on furigana --a Traveler, David (Tokyo, Japan)
In short, my opinion is: you must learn to read Japanese as the Japanese themselves read it. But there is more than one way to achieve that objective.
Outside of Japanese language pedagogy, there is also the issue of the inroads that Latin letters have made into Japanese texts written for native Japanese consumption. In one essay on this site, “One Language, Four Scripts”, I list romaji as one of the scripts used in written Japanese. Purists in the crowd would denounce this as utter blasphemy; and I have received a few emails pointing out that romaji is a “foreign” script that is “not real Japanese.”
I understand their point, but the fact remains that the Japanese themselves throw Latin letters into their texts all the time. Here is one example from Panasonic’s site in Japan, clearly targeted at native Japanese-speakers:
“Panasonic DVDレコーダー「DIGA（ディーガ）」をはじめ、パナソニックのDVD関連商品 情報への入り口ページです”
Latin letters have found a niche in written Japanese, as vehicles for corporate names and technical acronyms. I see this as analogous to the niche that Roman numerals have in English as ordinals (I., II., III., IV…), and Greek letters like pi (π) as scientific and mathematical symbols. And let’s not forget that kanji itself is a script with foreign origins. As everyone knows, the Japanese borrowed them from China.
This doesn’t mean that I will accept no limits on foreign influences in the Japanese language. While linguistic borrowings have their place, they can become downright silly when they are done simply for the sake of being trendy. Throughout the 1920s, many American writers tried to make their prose more sophisticated by overusing French loanwords. The result is that English Literature students today have to read several of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories with a French dictionary inhand.
In this regard, I have a “purist” pet peeve of my own: hakuraigo. While I don’t have a problem with the importation of technical terms like DVD, I absolutely cringe when I hear a Japanese speaker use a clumsy pseudo-English term like スイッチする. Why say スイッチするwhen a perfectly serviceable Japanese word like 交換する exists? And don’t even get me started on ミルク. Why does anyone speaking Japanese need to say or write ミルク? The Japanese word for “milk” is 牛乳, for goodness sake!
We language aficionados tend to be a quirky bunch. As the excessive use of hakuraigo easily sets me off, I am able to understand those Japanese language enthusiasts who have a passionate abhorrence of romaji-- even if I do not entirely share their sentiments.