Education: Don’t Take The Romaji Short-Cut When Learning Japanese

Don’t Take The Romaji Short-Cut When Learning Japanese

Written by Stephen Munday

This is an issue many Japanese learners come up against, particularly if they live outside Japan. After all, If you are not in repparttar

country, it seems difficult to justify repparttar 146214

huge amount of time that learning Japanese characters seems to require.

So what are repparttar 146215 problems in using Romaji (Roman letters, like repparttar 146216 characters you are reading right now) for studying Japanese:

1. Mother-Tongue Conflict

The associations your brain will create between Japanese words written in Romaji and English words (or those of your mother tongue) greatly increases repparttar 146217 risk of mispronunciation. Japanese symbols will have none of these associations for you. The very fact that they are completely alien helps you to start your language learning experience from a blank sheet. Your chances of being able to gain repparttar 146218 correct pronunciation soar.

2. Show Me The Romaji

Your textbook may be in Romaji, but you will be very hard-pressed to find any real examples in Japan. Of course, you can see a fair amount of reasonably understandable English, but not Romaji. And watch what happens when write some Japanese in Romaji and show it to your native speaker friend: They have a really hard time deciphering it, because Japanese people just don’t it.

3. Today’s Crutch Becomes Tomorrow’s Burden

If you decide to continue your studies in Japanese, you will eventually need to start to grapple with repparttar 146219 characters themselves anyway. In my opinion, it is harder to leave repparttar 146220 crutch of Romaji behind than it is to bite repparttar 146221 character bullet at repparttar 146222 beginning of your studies.

As you can see, there are serious problems with using Romaji when you start to learn Japanese. So what is my advice to learners? Well, it really depends on your motivation and needs:

1. The Serious Student

Public School Sex-Education Classes --- Bad News For Parents And Children

Written by Joel Turtel

One of parents’ most important duties is to protect their children from harmful sexual values and behaviors. Yet many public schools force potentially harmful, sometimes shockingly explicit sex education on their students.

Most of repparttar time, parents have no control over repparttar 145945 content of these classes. Occasionally, a group of parents finds out about a particularly obnoxious sex education class and protests to repparttar 145946 principal or local school board. The class may be dropped, only to be replaced by another class that teaches equally objectionable material.

School authorities’ cavalier attitude towards parents on this issue shows their anti-parent bias, and their contempt for parents’ rights to control repparttar 145947 values their children are taught.

Many school authorities insist that children need comprehensive sex education from kindergarten through high school. They believe parents can't be trusted because they have shameful feelings about sex or have “outdated” moral or sexual values. School authorities, claiming that they know best regarding sex education, usurp repparttar 145948 parents’ role, allegedly for repparttar 145949 good of repparttar 145950 children. In doing so, they show contempt for parents’ rights, values, and common sense.

Many sex-education classes indoctrinate children with sexual values that can cause them irreparable harm. For example, these classes often promote repparttar 145951 idea that most sexual behaviors are acceptable, including adultery, homosexuality, masturbation, and premarital sex.

The sex-education instructor simply tells repparttar 145952 kids to "be careful" or use their "common sense" when they engage in these behaviors. As if we can depend on teenagers with raging hormones to be careful or use their common sense. The soaring teen pregnancy rate in this country puts repparttar 145953 lie to this notion.

Horror stories about sex education classes and flagrant violations of parents’ rights confront us from around repparttar 145954 country. Here are only four of those stories:

• On March 19, 1996, a public school in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania made 59 sixth-grade girls submit to a genital examination as part of a routine physical. The school did not ask for parental consent. During repparttar 145955 exam, school officials blocked repparttar 145956 exit doors and refused to let repparttar 145957 crying and pleading young girls call their parents.

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