renaissance poisson

yeah, eleanor harz jorden invented her own system for her textbooks -- i have the first two. JSL, her system, has one big advantage over hepburn (which kunreishiki also has): it makes it easier to conjugate because you can always simply change the final vowel of the root mora, while in hepburn you have to sometimes change entire endings. that has definite merit. i am more dubious about her other contention: that hepburn is more likely to lead to sloppy, unjapanese pronunciation, because we're supposedly too familiar with the letters in english. maybe i am an exception because this isn't my first foreign language, but transliteration in a language with which i am already familiar has never kept me from learning even subtle nuances of the new language. besides, i don't see how that point even carries, because no romanisation can represent japanese properly; it's moot whether "hu" or "fu" is better, because the actual sound lies pretty much in between those, and the same goes for the other syllables in contention.

i tried to learn from her books, but her method and the way i learn don't mesh well. she believes that people should stick to listening/speaking for a long time. i see her point, but i learn much better if i start writing right away, especially in a language with a non-latin "alphabet"; i learn pronunciation tied to writing. ergo i am not really willing to stick with romanisation for as long as she does it; i'm mostly done with it now that i know the kana well, and it hinders/distracts me more than it helps me. she also dumps too much extra stuff on top: she use n̄ for the syllabic n (which feels WRONG to me because that n isn't a long sound like the vowels represented with macrons), she uses extra accents to indicate pitch (which i am dubious about), she adds an additional set of morae starting with ḡ for a nasal sound (which is totally non-japanese and throws the kana tables out of whack, and (like pitch) is not universal but a specialized dialect thing that's all too easy to get wrong). and -- a bit surprising for a series that prides itself on teaching the spoken language -- the practice dialogue is stiff and stilted, and the vocabulary is quite limited.

maybe worst of all, these are the most deadly boring textbooks i've seen since the 50's -- and i actually LIKE grammar! so yeah; too bad, because i can see she was a exceptional scholar. i'll keep the books around as a grammar reference, because they're outstanding in that regard.