Japanese - The Spoken Language

Japanese
#1

Hi, everyone! Back from a long, long hiatus here and I wanted to get your guys opinion on a textbook that I’ve picked up.

I decided as I was picking my studying journey back up that it would be a good time to reflect on what I was missing while doing my regular studies before and the phonetics aspect of Japanese seemed like something I wanted to add into my study routine.

So, I found this textbook called “Japanese - The Spoken Language” by Eleanor Jorden and Mari Noda and I’ve been plucking through the first chapter doing the listening exercises and I like it so far, but I also see some things that would definitely not be to everyone’s fancy.

For example, it seems the whole book uses romaji, which feels mildly counterintuitive to the whole learning to pronounce the symbols thing but whateva. It seems, for an advanced beginner like me, very accessible.

My question for you! Have you heard about/used this textbook in any way and what are your thoughts/what were your experiences with it?

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#2

I don’t know about the book personally, but any learning material that uses romaji is a hard no in my opinion. If you know the kana (you should as an “advanced beginner”) then most sources will use furigana with kanji so you know how to pronounce everything. Also, I imagine there are a ton of alternative sources out there that teaches the same things, even on youtube.

I bought a study book that used all romaji and it was basically unusable. It’s painful to read romaji after a certain point and it certainly isn’t teaching you what you ultimately need to know. But yeah, just my personal opinion.

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#3

That’s a fair point, and to be clear I do know how to read the kana lol, but to give the book some credit it seems to have a very systematic approach to using the romaji and the entire first section is dedicated to learning how to pronounce the mora with english equivalent examples (admittedly, also a bit problematic) , clarifications on the modes of articulation, and accompanying audio recordings.

To offer two immediate benefits from my short time with it thus far: I feel like I have a better understanding of how to pronounce う and I learned about 鼻濁音 for the first time.

Not saying it’s perfect by any means, but just wanted to throw out I don’t think its romaji only approach is /inherently/ disqualifying

Also, as food for thought, here’s the first table of exercises it offers for Japanese vowels Capture

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#4

Disqualifying is a strong word, but at the very least it’s unnecessarily wasted potential for kana reinforcement through interaction. Just throwing in a few assumptions:

  • If you want to learn Japanese, you won’t be able to avoid learning the kana
  • It’s probably the first thing most Japanese learners will learn
  • Learning the kana doesn’t take long
  • It’s perfectly doable in isolation and will from then on be reinforced by every learning material using it

So there just seems to be little to no point in going romaji beyond the stage of teaching hiragana. Which in my opinion should be before the stage of trying to listen / talk.

But then I’m not a linguist or a teacher, so I’m really just saying what comes to mind without much basis.

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