I received a very well thought out email this morning from an upper beginner wanting to work solely with conversational Japanese via romaji. He asks if teaching kanji is really necessary for Japanese language teachers:

“From my admittedly limited observation, it seems that Japanese language teachers suffer from what strikes me as probably more of a pedagogical conceit than anything that the spoken language cannot be learned without learning it in its native written form.”

He sees the lack of intermediate level textbooks in romaji as Japanese language academic purists “suppressing study of Japanese except on their terms.”

Here is my reply:

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Hi,

I understand your frustrations, but I am one of those who would highly recommend hitting kanji as hard as possible as early as possible. I do know one excellent teacher who doesn’t think romaji is a negative influence on students, but he is in the minority. I don’t think it is necessarily pedagogical conceit – although that may be true in some cases. (I learned so you have to learn it too darn it!)

As you mention, the written and spoken are two very separate issues. This is true with Japanese also - until you enter the intermediate stage. Then kanji plays a huge role in vocabulary in my opinion. It isn’t always perfect, but you can often ‘think’ in kanji to create or figure out new vocabulary without actually studying them.

In English many of the simpler but extremely useful everyday words are of Anglo-Saxon/Germanic origin. The less useful, but higher class words are of Latin/French origin. (deer -> venison; king -> royalty; dog-> canine). A superficial comparison can be made with native Japanese pronunciations (kun yomi) and imported Chinese readings (on yomi). The On yomi is usually used with kanji compounds (jukugo) similar to how we use Latin based words. These aren’t too important for beginners to learn, but necessary for intermediates to be able to express themselves creatively. For example:

左 hidari left – (kun yomi) uses native Japanese pronunciation for this simple but extremely useful meaning.
左派 sa ha left (politically) – (on yomi) uses the ‘Chinese’ pronunciation for the more specialized use of the word.

If you heard ‘sa ha’ but hadn’t learned that word, you could guess its meaning based on context and knowing ‘派’ meant party of a particular mindset and ‘sa’ was an on reading of 左. Even easier, if you saw it written as such, you can guess based on the meaning of these two very common kanji.

I know you want to concentrate on your conversational Japanese, but my concern is it could impede your future progress. It is much easier to learn the meaning and readings of a single kanji (派, for example) than to learn 100 different words that use that character separately. You may notice that the sound ‘ha’ can have a meaning of ‘a party’ or ‘mindset,’ but you will also realize it can mean ‘a tooth,’ ‘a blade,’ ‘a leaf’ etc. Of course context is everything, but having a mental image of the kanji behind the sounds really opens up new worlds.

Lastly, I’ll share my story. When I first arrived in Japan, I was a beginner. So were a few other English teachers who arrived with me. Most of them decided to work purely on conversational Japanese and they neglected kanji. I did the exact opposite and worked hard on my kanji. After a few months I noticed their conversational skills were much better than mine. Undaunted, I continued concentrating on kanji. After a year or so I met up with some of them again and noticed my conversational skills had far past their abilities. Maybe they stopped studying after learning basic conversational Japanese, but I still feel like it was the kanji background that gave me that boost.