The Argument: To Learn Via Written Japanese, Or Through the Roman Alphabet?

t's always a dilemma for me when teaching Japanese to decide just how much the student needs to learn in order to achieve his/her goals. I have stated several times that Japanese is one of the easiest languages to learn -- and I stand by that statement -- but in reality it's a little bit of a white lie.

The spoken language is fairly easy; I can point to many reasons for why this is so -- but what makes Japanese continue to appear in top-5 lists of "Languages Most Difficult to Learn" is the written system, which is a complete and total disaster.

Proof of this comes in the very fact that the Japanese government itself, through the centuries, has tried to make the written language easier with various proposals -- one of which was seriously considered: writing everything in the Roman alphabet! But these "improvements" have never taken hold and the best they seem to have been able to do is to reduce the number of kanji (Chinese characters) that are required for students to know in order to graduate high school.

But it's still a mess. The Japanese long ago appropriated Chinese characters for their written language, but also have two other forms of writing, called kana, that are uniquely Japanese.

The trouble begins when one starts mixing the three systems. It's where everything becomes insanely difficult.

The kanji themselves often have several ways of reading and sometimes up to ten different pronunciatons, so you can imagine that when you take the required 1,945 kanji but add all these readings and pronunciations, you end up with something like 10,000 separate bits of information that must be memorised -- well, this poses an insurmountable problem to anyone learning to read and write Japanese and is also a problem for the Japanese themselves!

I myself consciously gave up studying the writing system about two years in to my 5-year stay in Japan. I simply felt that the effort would be better directed elsewhere, in vocabulary and grammatical skills, for example. I had no reason whatsoever to be able to read a Japanese newspaper.

I'm very glad I did, but I have now started actively studying kanji again. When I was in Japan, there were no iPads, there was no Internet. Hence, I could only learn, cumbersomely, from books.

Now, I have about eight separate apps on my iPad alone dedicated just for kanji.

Also note that by the time I had given up, I had learned to recognize, if not write, up to 200 kanji and all the kanas.

Whether you are going to want to study Japanese in Japanese is totally up to you. It can be studied using the roman alphabet exclusively, but I highly discourage this approach. It will lead to many headaches later on. It is worth your while to at least learn the kana systems, and preferably, at least the 100 or so most commonly used kanji.

But it's your call.