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Comment by gchucky | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I gotta disagree with you. Learning Japanese using an antiquated romaji system (si vs shi, etc.) and not learning any kana or kanji won't get you very far. What good is that when show up in Japan and can't read any of the signs around you?

I saw Eleanor Jorden (writer of JSL) talk at Cornell, and a kid in the audience asked, "I opened a book and saw a bunch of squiggly lines!" To throw out a language's native written system is folly.

We used the Genki bookset in school, and it worked pretty well.

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See my other comment. I would be willing to bet that more top performers under the JSL system compared with top performers under a reading / writing focused system will end up being much more successful in careers / life in Japanese society.

Japanese people take for granted that Kanji is hard and are forgiving when Westerners aren't that great at it, but it's painfully hard to listen to someone speak with non-native intonation and poor grammar.

Actually Japanese know it is hard, and focus on it like madmen. A top Nintendo DS game for adults in Japan is a Kanji re-training game.

In any case, Kanji is so visual - until I learned it many words didn't make sense to me. Knowing how to say it, but not understanding the real-underlying meaning is not fun.

As far as intonation, Japanese is one of the easiest languages with regards to that. Once you get the basics it is simple, but still you must talk with others (Japanese club, co-workers, neighbors, skype, etc) and listen to real Japanese (anime, news, etc.)

I don't meet many Westerners that think Japanese intonation is easy. :-) It's probably the most critical aspect of sounding natural when stacked up against all other factors and can make or break the tone of the conversation.

I think Japanese intonation is very hard for native english speakers but it's not hard at all for someone speaking romance languages (the sonorities are rather similar to spanish I find...)

the sonorities are rather similar to spanish I find...

This is very true. I grew up in an area where lots of Spanish is spoken, and I learned a tiny bit myself. For me, Japanese pronunciation was trivial. My teachers were praising me right off the bat. The only difficulty I have is with my current tutor, who is bent on teaching me to pronounce the Japanese r/l the way a Japanese would. (AFAIK it's not necessary at all for understandability, just a pet peeve of hers.) I had a very different experience with French and German, so I know I'm not especially gifted at phonetics. I think the early exposure to Spanish was the key.

> What good is that when show up in Japan and can't read any of the signs around you?

Anyone have an idea of how difficult it would be to do an augmented reality iPhone app that would translate these signs, etc., on the fly for you? If I were traveling, I would probably buy an iPhone just for that app.

A quick Google search turned up this NYT article [1] from 2002 about the idea. Does this exist in a retail app already?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/14/technology/what-s-next-poi...

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