I'm not usually one to speak bluntly, but, at least for Japanese, speaking from a lot of experience, this is flat out the wrong approach.
Older books like the romanzied "Japanese for Busy People" took this approach. I started with this book, it felt easy at the time, but it was immensely impractical - you don't build up enough of a base to learn from any other material. It's completely useless. After over a year, in a formal setting, I ultimately decided to just completely start over.
Currently Japanese courses mostly just focus on Hiragana and Katakana, since material for children usually has pronunciation guides over the kanji anyway. This is workable, but it just gives you no leverage where you could have some - you end up memorizing a thousand indiviaul words, some of which maybe kind of sound similar in parts, when you could instead learn a dozen charcters, and know that they share root words. Phoenetic approaches work for children who are in a situation where they can memorize from immersion with native speakers, and have additional clues like context and intonation to emphasize root words, to pick up new vocabulary.
When I started studying Chinese, we instead went with a "radicals-first" approach, and after just a short time of that, my Japanese vocabulary exploded - I could suddenly pick out all the seafood on a menu, and I started asking people mid-conversation "oh, does that use these characters?", and I could understand what it meant without them having to struggle to translate to English: Heart+Electric+Map - it's probably an electrocardiogram, especially if we're talking about hospitals. If you haven't learned the kanji, you don't even know if you can make that association from the sounds, much less how to ask that question.
That's how you get to fluency, by building up a foundation that lets you learn without active study. You can't get there by avoiding the basis of word composition in the language. Apologies if my frustration with characters-last approaches came through a little strong - they wasted a lot of my time.
> characters-last approaches
I think it's more accurate to call what Mair's advocating a "language-first-characters-later-if-necessary" approach.
Here's what Mair said about Chinese classes:
It’s a tragedy that so many young Americans spend years stuffing their heads with hundreds of Chinese characters, gaining no usable proficiency, and then forgetting them all by the time they’re 25. If the Chinese would wake up and permit pinyin to function as part of a genuine digraphia, then I would say it might make sense for maybe 2 percent of the population to learn up to third-year level of Mandarin—strictly romanized, mind you. But there are exceedingly few teachers who are enlightened enough to teach it that way.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/02/more-on-h...
Given, much to Mair's displeasure, that actual native media is written with kanji, they're immediately necessary, and not studying kanji effectively bars students from any learning outside the classroom until they have - which is completely counter to giving students either the context necessary for immersion or the reinforcement for traditional study to work.
Maybe it's merited for Chinese classes, with its larger character set, but Mair's approach just sacrifices students' ability to learn on their own in favor of lowering attrition rates of intro-level classes. It's actively harmful to students aiming for fluency to build up the characters as this insurmountable mountain in the distance before they can actually use their knowledge, rather than the useful compositional blocks and visual aids that they are.
They are very reasonably separable. If they weren't, countries like Korea couldn't have switched their orthography (which they did).
Also Japanese people enjoyed playing games like マザー２. This is part of "actual native media", and Japanese writing could look like this:
https://youtu.be/F_UrqsO2JQ0?t=10m15s
(Notice the native narrator has no trouble reading the kana-only writing.)
It's true that much of current native media still uses kanji, but they aren't "immediately necessary". There are books/manga with furigana and software tools like Rikaichan/kun for online articles.
People should be able to learn whatever they want outside of the classroom, including kanji (being able to recognise commonly used characters certainly helps in understanding native media). It's just that grammar, vocabulary, etc (real language) are much more important than kanji for beginners.
Games that use a strict hiragana character set are readable by natives because they're already fluent in speaking; they're unnecessarily difficult for non-native speakers, particularly since they tend to only have the bare minimum of separators between words. After living in 4 prefectures, working for a small Japanese company, and dating a native speaker for roughly a decade, I still find those games hard to read - it's just hard to identify the shapes of words, like reading English with no spaces; you have no choice but to guess where the boundaries are and sound everything out syllable by syllable, because everything's written differently from how you'd see it anywhere else.
If some people want to put off kanji or memorize phrases from a travel guide, that's their prerogative, but not teaching the compositional aspects of kanji, and leaving students to fend for themselves after selling the idea that it's all rote memorization (and seemingly to push this implausible ethnocentric dream of the language one day being exclusively romanized) is just a disservice to the students, as it was to me.
This is an argument for spending more time trying to become fluent in speaking (by learning vocab/grammar/etc) than spending time learning how to draw a bunch of characters.
The use of spaces would be necessary if Japan were to switch to kana, and that's one of the 3 things Kanamoji-kai recommends as well:
http://kanamozi.org/hikari958-08_kanamozibun-kakikata.pdf
Without spaces kana-only writing would be hard to read for most native speakers.
I honestly don't see any issue in not teaching kanji in Japanese classes, any more than not teaching cursive writing or Latin in English classes. They are just not essential. (Please do not start a lecture on how Latin helps you understand English.)
> ethnocentric dream of the languge one day being romanized
I'm not saying Japan should switch to romaji. I think in Japan's case kana would be much more realistic.
Also, I'm not advocating abolishing kanji either (people should be able to write kanji all day everyday if that's what they want to do).
I just want the government to (a) stop teaching kanji in public schools, and (b) mandate the use of kana (or some other phonetic writing system) in government documents.
I don't see how it's "ethnocentric". For most non-native speakers it's much easier to learn this way. Only non-native Japanese learners I've met who found it "easier to read" kana-kanji writing were people who already knew kanji e.g. Chinese people who were learning Japanese & were not fluent in speaking. The true of the matter is they were just familiar with the characters and they often didn't even know how to pronounce the words.
> English spelling is just as complicated, in my opinion
That's a separate issue, but I agree with you to some extent. Here's a Feynman quote (which I agree with 100%):
If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell "friend," I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
> "stop teaching kanji in public schools" is pretty much the same as abolishing kanji
I don't think so. There are many things that aren't taught in public schools but taught in private classes (calligraphy/ikebana/yoga/etc).
It's good that people who care about these cultures enjoy them in their own time and other people are left alone and not being forced to learn something they think has a low ROI.
If kanji is such a good idea as you claim, it will survive and thrive without government coercion, don't you think?
I wrote this book based on that need. So step 1: learn hiragana, because after the introductory chapter you're not getting romanised Japanese anymore. However, because it's not a writing course, all kanji have furigana so that you can read every sentence. This book is not going to calmly and gently lead you through the Japanese grammar, it's meant as a proper "you need this book for a year at most, after that you should already know everything that we cover". Perhaps not to the degree that you can duplicate the book, or in a way that makes you remember all the technical terms, but all the constructions and how they use them: this is the pace you run through learning Japanese at first year university level.
Learning 2500 kanji from the beginning is a major cognitive task that shouldn't be a primary focus, nor is it in native Japanese language pedagogy. But learning the kana is simple, again I learned them as an adult and had them down cold in a few weeks of active classwork. My kanji retention is terrible, but learning materials almost always give the reading of kanji using furigana, and there are useful tools for annotating web pages, etc. with furi readings.
My grasp of Japanese is virtually non-existent, but I noticed this as well. Taking an example from the post, I find something like しっけ easier to parse than the romaji shikke. The latter form just feels clumsy for reasons I can't really articulate.
It also makes the pronunciation a little easier at times. If I read "desu", I read it with a fairly pronounced "u" sound. Reading です, on the other hand, I know without really thinking about it that the う sound is typically very short.
Really though, you can learn hiragana in a single sitting using mnemonic trickery and you can commit it to memory using a spaced repetition or flashcard system in a few days. Not learning hiragana and katakana seems much more of a hindrance than "wasting time" by learning it.
My book is geared specifically towards people who are to enthusiastically committed to learning Japanese, and want more information about the language they're paying money for to learn, with some assumptions about what that means: they, like me, and like many of my fellow students at the time, but not like everyone, want to learn Japanese properly, without hand holding because some grammar or some orthography is deemed too hard. We'll see whether that's the case as we learn, not as an assumption baked into the course.
Of course that method doesn't work for everyone, but for me, and for many others, but again not for everyone, getting kanji early was exciting, motivating, and awesome. I would have been angry at a promise of a better approach without kanji for half a year as a paying student.
So that's the book you get here, too: I am not making assumptions on how slowly you want material, this is a grammar for supplementing your course work, or deep diving if that's what you want to do. And if the Japanese used in the book is too much, too soon: it's a free book, find one you feel fits you better. But we're better off with a spectrum of works: rather than every book following the best methodology, we need all those methodologies, and then people who go hard, fast, can pick the hard, fast books, and people who don't can pick the slower, "better success rate" approaches and do well with those instead.
And another comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286516, expands on that a bit more.
Thank you so much for your hard work!
Also I think some example sentences in the book would sound awkward to native speakers. (e.g. "今日自転車で帰り中で転んでしまいました", "もっと安いのありましょうか", "お箸の使い方に慣れてない人に難しいです" (this may be a typo), "きれいじゃないで、明るい部屋です", etc.)
I think this girl gives better advice on how to learn Japanese:
As for odd sounding sentences: nice! let me know about them on the github repo. Link's in the side nav as the github icon, but the direct link is https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues
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.
I think Mair's advice of not focusing on the script is valid.
Look at Kanamoji-kai for example (if you can read Japanese):
For example Prof Victor Mair is against teaching Chinese characters to beginners:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10554
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580
pay little or no attention to memorizing characters (I would have been content with actively mastering 25 or so very high frequency characters and passively recognizing at most a hundred or so high frequency characters during the first year)
focus on pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, particles, morphology, syntax, idioms, patterns, constructions, sentence structure, rhythm, prosody, and so forth — real language, not the script