What I learned today: something about the three main ways of romanizing Japanese. The other day I talked to a friend about how inconvenient it is that there are very few Japanese language textbooks written in Swedish, because sometimes using English means taking a detour in the thought process because there are differences between these languages after all. (Also, not all Swedes – especially not the young ones – are fluent enough in English to be able to use it as a language of instruction.) I have seen one before that uses the “learn Japanese from manga!” method; it doesn’t work for me because I like grammar and proper explanations. ;)
Anyway, today I found a Swedish textbook at the library (written by three Swedish-speaking native Japanese teachers). It’s not like I have time to study this book but I took it home anyway, to look at it a little bit. I noticed right away that there are differences from the Genki textbook used in my class, for one thing the method for romanization. This book uses “kunrei-siki” because, the preface says, this makes it “easier to show the verb endings”. That’s all they say about it. Well, maybe, I don’t know? I had to look this up because I had never seen this before, so I read about “Romanization of Japanese” on Wikipedia and learned that there are three main methods and obviously none of them is perfect, but kunrei-siki is taught to Japanese schoolchildren.
So, okay then. But in what way does this make things clearer when it comes to writing verb endings? I don’t understand what the writers mean by that? (As far as I can see, the Hepburn system shows the pronunciation more accurately, at least judging by my own poor ears when watching dramas? I feel that if I had read this book without having heard any Japanese, I would get the wrong idea about how to say the words.) It’s not like this is a super important question (the important thing for me is not to forget the characters that I learned in class last year!), I just don’t get it. Any ideas?
