Comment by equinoxnemesis
3 hours ago
The traditional way to develop a similar intuition with a kana-only approach is to think of it as "moving across the row" in the kana table, which works fine. I think the fact that with romaji we can represent the stem as mat- is interesting and valuable in a theoretical sense but not all that useful to a learner.
I have trouble comprehending the idea that this is only interesting in a theoretical sense but not all that useful to a learner. Could you give me something additional here? I’m not trying to be a dick here but my first reaction is “that’s just nuts” and I want to know what I’m missing.
The reason I say it's not useful (as opposed to merely interesting) to a learner is that I think if you're ever explicitly forming a structure like "mat-" in your head while thinking about how to say something or how to interpret something in Japanese, you are doing something quite unnatural, since that form cannot actually be expressed in the language. A fluent or native speaker knows that, eg. to make "matsu" a polite order, the tsu (tu) becomes chi (ti) and then you add nasai; they are not thinking about the isolated 't' consonant (which in this example is not actually even the same consonant - and native speakers know that, considering they distinguish ティ in loanwords!).
As for why it's interesting and useful theoretically - well, Japanese is of course older than the kana chart, and if you're doing diachronic linguistics I think taking mat- to be the stem is probably a useful frame to think about the origins of the modern conjugation paradigm.
> you are doing something quite unnatural
It is equally unnatural to form kana in your head when thinking about how to say something! Or, it’s unnatural to think about whether a verb is godan or ichidan when speaking, it’s unnatural to think about what particles are, etc.
You get an explanation for a concept and you internalize it. The explanation is a framework for you to internalize the concept, and once the concept is internalized, you no longer need it. The explanations are still useful, like romaji is still useful. None of the explanations are necessary, some are useful.
Maybe you get a few different partially wrong explanations of what the “wa” particle means before you internalize it. You’re not getting damaged by those explanations, they’re Wittgenstein’s ladder. (Well, maybe you got some bad explanations, but even the good explanations are wrong.)
You throw a bunch of different explanations at different students, combine it with practice and lots of examples, and eventually it sticks.
> which in this example is not actually even the same consonant
By that standard, the “t” in “butter” is not the same consonant as the “t” in “tap” (try it!)
People are really good at understanding and learning phonology and can really internalize it and understand it on an intuitive level, even if they can’t explain the rules for it. If you’re a native English speaker, you accept that there’s a “t” in “butter” and a “t” in “tap” even though they are not the same sounds (phones). That’s because they are the same phonemes.
Romaji is an effective way of writing down Japanese phonemes.
You don’t need to visually split the consonant apart as a separate character to recognize the relationship between か/き/く/け/こ - after all, the Japanese manage to do it without Latin letters. It adds very little to do so except as a crutch to let a learner continue to think using their native orthography, which only impedes learning. And given what a small hurdle it is, especially compared to the multitude of enormous hurdles the language has in store for you, you’re better off just jumping over it and moving on to those more interesting ones.
I don’t want to be argumentative here, but,
- “Need to” is a very different criterion from “is useful”, and “visually split” is, well, kind of unexpected to me!
- The comparison to native Japanese speakers seems especially irrelevant here,
- You’re not using your native orthography here, you’re using romaji, I don’t think it’s anyone’s native orthography.
- You probably want to use the Romaji heavily anyway, because that’s how most people will use computers.
When you’re learning a language you naturally multiple approaches to understanding a single topic. You’ll see a word written, you’ll hear it. You’ll hear a sentence and then someone will give you an explanation of the grammar, and you’ll compare that with your notes. It’s multimodal and all of these different modes are useful.
Like how romaji is useful for understanding conjugations. Obviously not necessary, just useful.