There are two examples of kana usage in Japan that demonstrate this; braille and morse code.

It can’t be claimed that blind people are unable to comprehend what they read in braille. It is the same Japanese. It is sound represented through kana encoded as braille.¹ Nor has this been lost on Japanese educators.

The blind man can be better educated than his more fortunate brethern who are endowed with good sight; for the former by acquiring the forty-seven letters of the I-ro-ha syllabary, through the Braille system, can read history, geography or anything written in that system; whereas he who has eyesight cannot read the daily paper unless he has mastered at least 2000 characters.

Nitobe Inazo, quoted in Ideogram J Marshall Unger. ²

Entire fleet movements and diplomatic negotiations were driven through kana, enciphered then encoded to a variation of the morse code, wabun code. Not only was this sufficient for the Japanese to understand but also for the British and Americans who had cracked their ciphers. (Although Toland seems to argue that the Americans’ poor translations hindered the negotiations to avoid war. p180 Rising Sun)

Another example, this time of romaji use, is in multipart carbonless forms on postal deliveries. These have to be made with a typewriter and romaji is the most efficient way to do this. And yet no-one would suggest that the Japanese post office can’t read these addresses and deliver them, extremely quickly.

The Myth that bloggers are perpetuating is number five on DeFrancis’ list of six myths about Chinese characters. The Indispensability Myth. More than anything else, the continued use of kanji in Japan is cultural rather than pragmatic. Perhaps bloggers want to have extra reasons to spend a large amount of time on learning kanji. Kanji are indispensable to being literate in Japanese, given that that is what is used in Japan, but you cannot rightly claim that kanji are the only way to properly represent spoken Japanese (nor the most functional).

Unfortunately we have to deal with what is. While it would be pragmatic to use kana or romaji alone, “real” Japanese is written using kanji. Japanese would find kana alone easier in the long run as they have complete command of their spoken language, but for JSL learners oddly kanji when augmented with a computer can make things easier. It is easier to do a dictionary search. It is also possible to extract some meaning without fully understanding the kanji or the word. ³

I doubt very much there will be any language reform to eliminate kanji. They are too much a part of the culture at this point. Language reform would need a revolution to carry it, such as when kanzi were simplified under the communists in China, or abandoned in favour of a roman alphabet in Vietnam. Or be imposed by a totalitarian regime such as happened with hangul. At any rate, reform if it comes will come from the Japanese themselves rather than from any outside forces. Japan’s last opportunity was immediately after World War II, while they did simplify some things they didn’t bite the bullet and introduce more far reaching script reforms.

For JSL learners, the trend now seems to be hiragana, then a limited amount of kanji in Adult education at least where once whole courses would only use romaji. The emphasis is on spoken Japanese and communication. ⁴ Romaji is often used in the earlier stages. I suspect university degree courses have a greater emphasis on written Japanese and kanji (but have yet to satisfactorily address how to teach these). For self-taught, well it’s up to the individual. But I’m sad to see an emerging elitism around the use of kana and kanji (and specific methods) rather than an excitement in exploring Japanese to whatever level is desired.

Further reading.
J Marshall Unger is very interesting on the area of script reform, romaji and literacy. While I’m sure many would dispute with him, his credentials as a researcher and scholar of Japanese are impeccable. Unlike me, say, he’s not just a random blogger.

Here are excerpts from
The Fifth Generation Fallacy
This is an interesting book. The computing aspects are completely outdated now, but they do give an insight into problems that have only relatively recently been overcome. I’d like to see an essay from Ungar on what he thinks of the current situation in computing in regards to the Japanese language now. Whereas in 1987 he was writing about the complexity and cost of pen input and OCR, yet I now have good pen input on a Nintendo DS and OCR that costs under $200 (compared to $50,000 plus for roman only when he was writing). However what he has to say about Japanese literacy and the efficiency of roman touch-typed input compared to any other method still remains true today.

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan
Research from the late 1940′s suggest that romaji is a much better way for Japanese children to learn. Research also suggests that Japan might not have been as literate a society as was imagined. Kanji were for the elite, who had the time to master them.

Ideogram

Notes

1. There are systems for representing kanji in braille but understandably they don’t seem to have much traction. Ungar points out in Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan that it was developed for social reasons as the blind were discriminated against for their inability to talk about and deal with kanji (p26, p126).

2. Nitobe probably wrote this in English, rather than this being a translation. However I can’t access the original source.

3.

Many non-Japanese believe that because they can guess the meaning of a word like uwayaku if they know the meanings of other words written with the same kanji, “knowing a kanji” in this ad hoc sense is sufficient for written communication. For them, the correct reading is a mere detail of little consequence. While it is easy to see why they should think this way, they are mistaken—as are Chinese college students who think they can coast through Japanese texts by looking only at the kanji.

J Marshall Unger Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan p20

4. It’s hard to find studies about teaching Japanese or literacy in JSL learners. Maybe this discourse only happens in Japanese, maybe it just doesn’t happen. My only resource is the Internet really, where sometimes I find tantalising references or abstracts but without access to a university library or login (and 4 years of not getting paid and circa £70k to spare to pursue a language degree) my amateur (dilettantish) efforts are stymied. I wish bloggers would either keep to opinion (“this is how it works for me”) rather than absolute statements not backed up by citations or research (“romaji is bad”) or even just stop making stuff up.

Related posts:

1. Easy Japanese Crosswords Puzzles: Using Kana
2. Is Romaji a bad idea?
3. Self Study Kana Workbook

I think it has its uses.

1. The character set is familiar
If English (or a European) language is your first language you are very familiar with the roman alphabet. You’ll be drawing on years of experience.
When you’re beginning you won’t be scared off by an unfamiliar and complex writing system. You can immediately get to grips with classroom situations.

2. It’s quick to take notes in
Again by the time you start learning Japanese you can probably write quite quickly using script (joined-up-writing) or even printing for clarity. Probably much faster and neater (and hence legible) than writing in kana. It’s good for speed.

3. It’s easy to read
Once again it’s familiar. As long as you learn the romanisation system properly and are not tempted to use an English style of pronunciation, reading romaji is pretty plain sailing.
The English writing conventions of capitals and lowercase, spaces, ascenders and decenders, makes it very easy to read quickly. You read by the word shapes. There are experiments where you can still read a sentence as long as the first and last letters in a word are correct and the number of letters is correct. There are also experiments showing that lowercase letters aid legibility.
By comparison the unfamiliar forms of kana mean you often have to read a word if not a sentence symbol by symbol. Granted once you can read kanji reading actually becomes easier.

4. It’s easier to use in an index
I can never remember the order of the kana much beyond あいうえお、かきくけこ、and I only know いろは of the traditional order. Even if I have to recite it sometimes I do know the alphabet’s order.

5. You’ll use it to type anyhow.
To use a roman keyboard to input Japanese you have no choice but to use romaji.
You can buy a Japanese keyboard and input kana directly. However, oddly enough this can be slow as you are probably more familiar with a QWERTY layout even if you are a two fingered look at the keyboard typist than you are with the kana layout. I know I tried and reverted back to QWERTY fairly quickly. Maybe with time you would become familiar with the kana locations.

6. You don’t actually need kana or kanji to speak Japanese.
but it helps. This is a slightly old argument now. Once Japanese courses didn’t teach kana or kanji at all. And it’s possible to speak perfectly good Japanese without being able to read or write it. Just be prepared for the huge shock of finding yourself almost completely illiterate if you ever arrive in Japan.

However…

Kana and kanji are what are used in Japan and to be literate you have to learn them. I think you should use them as soon as possible and as much as possible.
Usually students use romaji at first and then kana is introduced and then kanji even later on, if ever.

One of the main reasons not to use kana and kanji from the beginning perhaps, is so as not to scare beginning students!
(I remember the first class I took. The teacher spoke Japanese all the time! Everyone thought she couldn’t speak English. )
Kana, Kanji and a new language could be information overload.

But perhaps there could be another way. use romaji in a furigana way. That is until students are comfortable with kana give the kanji, kana and romaji for any given word. Eventually dispense with romaji in favour of kana then gradually dispense with kana for particular kanji.

Another possible solution is a foundation course. Before beginning a Japanese course proper have a short 3 to 4 week course to learn kana and some basics of how the writing system and the language works. Basic words would be introduced as a result but no grammar or constructions as such. (and possibly even learn kanji using the Heisig method although this would be very controversial and would take 2 to 3 months.)

You can find further details about romaji at wikipedia

Related posts:

1. Maniackers Design Fonts
2. Self Study Kana Workbook
3. Electronic Dictionaries

にほんごをまなぼう　Lets Study Japanese is an interactive site based around school activities made by the Japanese Ministry of Education.

It is almost completely in Japanese. There are some English explanations of what to do, but otherwise it’s an immersive program. You click on pictures and you get a dialogue or a description written in kana and spoken to you in Japanese at the same time.

Both polite Japanese, the masu desu form, and casual plain Japanese is provided. The children mainly speaking plain form and adults polite form.

It sems to be mainly a teachers resource but I’m sure most students would be able to navigate it by themselves and learn new things. You might need to know your kana, but even then you could read along with the audio to improve your kana and there are learning kana screens as well.

sections include
15. じかんわり（jikanwari – timetable) for telling the time and dates
4. からだのなまえ（parts of the body)
3. トイレ (toilet)
10. きゅうしょく (school lunch)
11. そうじ (cleaning)

There’s a lot of vocabulary here presented in an interesting manner, it’s worth a look. I’ve learnt some new words already.

It needs shockwave and java I think. On my setup some of the voicerecording modules don’t seem to load, but you might have more luck. Also some directories seem to be missing. It also uses frames as well as shockwave which makes it hard to bookmark sections unfortunately. The last update was Heisei13 which I think is 2002 so it’s a bit dormant perhaps.

Related posts:

1. 漢字学習ステップ８級 • Kanji Study Step Level 8
2. Self Study Kana Workbook
3. JLPT 3 Kanji and Vocabulary Tests

Today I bought a little shareware program because it was on special offer.

World of Where is a geography quiz program. But the attraction for Japanese learners is that you can run it in Japanese. I bought it to help improve my katakana reading ability. As most places outside Japan have their names in katakana when playing a quiz as well as testing my knowledge of geography I hope it will speed up my sight reading of katakana.

The full program is available for Windows as well as MacOS. It covers the entire globe as political and physical maps although the physical maps could be more detailed I think. There is also a map of the solar system. Besides English and Japanese the program also runs in 10 other languages.

The demo program only allows access to Europe and the full program is a little expensive at $25.
The full program is also a little dissapointing in terms of Japanese as well. Unusually the section on Japan isn’t in Japanese. Also it only covers the main areas like Kantou and Chubu rather than the prefectures. Unfortunatly it can’t be customised or I might have made a more complete Japan map for it.

I don’t regret the $12 I spent, but for a bit of Japanese practice (if you know Europe) is to stick with the demo version.

Related posts:

1. Nuku
2. JLPT3 Kanji by Examples
3. iFlash

–update 29Apr08–

The kana display fonts are directly mapped to keys; therefore you type the characters directly rather than using Kotoeri input (or the IME in Windows). Leaving your keyboard in romaji input, select the font as AL (Roman characters) HA (Hiragana glyphs) or KT (Katakana glyphs) then type away.

This is one time a Japanese keyboard is really useful as the kana glyphs are printed on the keys.

This is the layout of the keyboard I have.
An Apple Japanese wireless keyboard.

The underlying keyboard layout is the US keyboard.

Unfortunately the voiced characters using ゛and ゜are found using the shift key so a bit of guesswork is needed to find them especially for あいうえお and the ま row.

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1. Mac OSX
2. MacOS X 10.5 Leopard すごい！
3. Is Romaji a bad idea?

The only way I found to really learn kana was to write them out again and again until I knew them. It takes about 2 weeks to a month. You should also write them out now and again after you’ve learnt them to keep them fresh in your memory.

Related posts:

1. Self Study Kana Workbook
2. Kanji
3. JLPT3 Roundup

If you haven’t managed to master kana a romaji version is also available. One note though the book uses American spelling so it’s color not colour. etc.

Related posts:

1. Self Study Kana Workbook
2. Is kana sufficient to write Japanese?
3. Jazz Up Your Japanese with Onomatopoeia

I found that the best way to learn kana was a row at a time. I did the exercises then wrote them out repeatedly saying the sound out loud. Each succeeding day I added the next row, when it became easier I added 2 rows. In spare moments I’d try to write out the syllabet from memory. Katakana was quicker to learn than hiragana. But in all I think it’d take at least a month to learn both systems. Once you’ve learnt it use it in preference to romaji when writing any Japanese.

I haven’t seen this book anywhere other than the Japan Centre in London Piccadilly.

There are sample pages available on this site

Related posts:

1. Nuku
2. Japanese for Busy People II – The Workbook
3. Is kana sufficient to write Japanese?