clay wrote:
JFBP only has a romaji version for Volume 1. After that I believe it is all in kana and introduces kanji as you go.
According to another (in this regard) trusted source, there are both romaji and kana versions for all 3 volumes of JFBP but only one version of JFBP workbook for each volume. Kana versions of textbooks have "Kana version" label on cover, workbooks don't have that so I assume they use romaji. Btw, I'm sorry for linking to another i-shop in the first post, it was my first time on TheJapanesePage and since I can't order from abroad, I didn't check if you have internet shop, only read through the forum.
And here's my 2 cents to neverending discussion about whether to learn kanji or not.
I understand reasons you listed as why to learn kanji and while I mostly agree with them, I think there also exist reasons against doing that. From what
I read on wikipedia Manyogana was sound based system and basis of kanji were built (adopted) for the Japanese language rather recently – “only" about 1,500 years ago. I also doubt that level of literacy was very high until a few centuries ago (though I might be wrong about this one and situation in this regard in Japan was different then in Europe). I heard that even people born blind are able communicate in Japanese rather well (I know this is quite an extreme example).
But more importantly, here are my specific reasons why I don't want to avoid learning kanji:
1. As I wrote in my first post, learning Japanese language is just a little hobby of mine and the amount of time I can spend on it is quite limited. Time spent on learning kanji might be used on e.g. improving grammar, enhancing vocabulary etc. instead of spending it on something that might get me discouraged and make me to drop the language entirely.
2. I'm native in the Czech language (which uses basically just letters used in English and a couple of accented letters), the only other alphabets I ever learnt are Cyrillic (for Russian language) and hiragana + katakana, all 3 of them being quite simple and easy to learn. When I checked on kanji I felt very overwhelmed both by a sheer number of characters (about 1,900
for just jouyou kanji) and the complexity of a single character (= number of strokes, I know it might not be that bad, if one learns radicals and kanji characters are not just a random bunch of lines anymore), not to mention the fact each character can have several readings/meanings. I might got it wrong but I think you can't just learn 200-300 of them and be able to read normal text (of course if someone stays in Japan, learning just common signs is a good idea) - in order to be able to read normal text, one has to learn (almost) all. It might not be completely fair comparison but it might be similar to just like learning let's say 10 out of 26 characters of English alphabet - it won't get you anywhere.
3. I hear that even native Japanese start forgetting (some) kanji once they get out of daily touch with written text. As I wrote in my original post, I start forgetting even some very simple less used katakana characters just after few weeks of not using them - might be just that I still haven't etched them deep enough on my memory though. Considering the time I could generally spend with written Japanese text, I think learning kanji for me would be probably just a waste of time and I would only get frustrated etc., see the #1.
Disclaimer: I'm well aware of fact that my English sucks and I should concentrate on improving it instead of attempting to try to learn another language, so you don't have to tell me that. 