Good Sites to learn Japanese with Romaji

[jonway]

Hi Guys,
Does anyone have any recommended sites that use romaji in teaching Japanese.
Of course, not merely romaji, but having English and Japanese text too.
Anyway, lets first drop the "should we learn Japanese with Romaji?" argument.
That shall be another thread entirely.
I want to collect opinions on which site would be best for beginners who would like to pick up some simple Japanese words first.
Appreciate your opinion.

 

[KiaiFighter]

I know you want to avoid the argument of 'should I learn the kana first?' but that's easy because it's not really an argument...
just learn the kana and use better study resources.

/thread

 

[bakasentai]

If you want to learn Japanese it would be good to have someone to practice with, Skype seems to be convenient for this, though i haven't tried it myself my friend who is learning Japanese excelled in our previous Japanese class because he had Japanese Skype friends he communicated on a daily bases with. That would be good for learning and remembering words and pronunciation. (It would also help with minor grammar mistakes most English-Japanese teaching materials seem to have every now and then).

As for writing material, there were a couple of sites I found for free that teach these kind of things, I think I lost them all after my last HDD crashed(there's is even a phone app or 2), you could also try looking up some lesson book pdf. (if they pdf. them, I'm not sure).

theres also this thread

 

[Emoni]

No avoiding the argument. It takes like a few days max to learn Hiragana and Katakana. Get to work or you will never even remotely understand or cover the language. It isn't even an argument to claim you don't need either.

 

[eeky]

I think for anyone with normal memory ability, "a few days" is optimistic to learn hiragana and katakana for any sensible definition of "few" and "learn". After a few days you should be able to falteringly pick through kana text, struggling to recall some characters and probably misremembering others. As the weeks of regular practice mount up, it gradually starts to get easier. Of course, learning the kana is vastly easier than learning all those darn kanji, which is a different proposition altogethr.

 

[bencelad]

I would recommend you to learn hiragana and katana first, then you are able to use any site pretty much.
It should not take longer than 2 days.
Japanese Hiragana Practice Test - Number One
Japanese Katakana Practice Test - Number One

 

[SomeCallMeChris]

Edit: Just realized this is a 4-year necropost. Please, beneclad... why did you do that? Leave 4-year old threads on such a trivial and recurring topic alone.

There just aren't any.

There are a lot of reasons that could be debated ad infinitum one way and the other about the best way to learn in a vacuum, but the real biggest reason that you need to learn the kana from the start is because all the quality learning resources are in Japanese script, not in romaji.

You may not agree with the idea that that's the best way to learn, and there are good arguments on both sides about how best to teach Japanese. However, the cold reality is that romaji based resources are few in number and poor in quality. You do yourself a disservice to do anything other than settle down to memorizing the kana as your first task.

 

[Mike Cash]

Please, beneclad... why did you do that?

Probably yet another in a series of people who join essentially in hopes of building traffic to their site/blog, although he hasn't given us the link yet. (He is free and welcome to share the link all he likes, as far as I'm concerned....so long as the site isn't commercial).

I started learning Japanese with the old Learn Japanese: New College Text series, which I seem to recall being heavy on romaji throughout the first volume because it taught kana as it went along, just the same as with vocabulary and grammar. I suffered no ill effects. While I certainly wouldn't recommend learning with romaji I do think that much of the warnings and admonitions associated using it at all instead of sitting down and brute-force memorizing the kana before starting are overblown. Makes no more sense than the idiocy the more rabid of the RTK Kool-Aid drinkers spread about having to "learn" over 2000 kanji before beginning to learn the language.

I must thank you for making me aware of the existence of the "Lock Thread" voting button. I had never noticed that before.