The romanisation part is ridiculous, but pops up all the time.
English and French spelling is as far removed from each other as anything. Anybody learning a foreign language will have to come to terms with the fact that the letters work slightly-to-moderately different for each language, whether those are European or Asian languages. Danish and Swedish are practically dialects of each other, but the spelling and pronunciation are miles apart. Trying to read one with the usage of the other will sound as stilted as any transliteration of any "non-alphabet" language.
Alphabet is the only official way to type out pronunciation of mainland Chinese, so trying to avoid the alphabet for Chinese is basically impossible.
Vietnamese, like several other Asian languages is Alphabet with diatrics, so again, you have to use Alphabet. There is nothing magical about Asian languages that gets contaminated by the Alphabet.
As for Japanese, the kana alphabet can be transcribed to Alphabet without information loss, so it is in no way a poor substitute. You also have to learn romanisations in order to type on a keyboard.
The bottom line is, you have to learn new sounds when learning a new language and you have to learn new spelling. shi in Japanese or Chinese are quite close to English, at least compared to how close ta is to the English pronunciation of "shi", so the alphabet acts as a nice mnemonic structure for learners.
The way i understood the GP is that Japanese has the benefit of having its own writing system so you won't get so easily lured into mapping sounds to back your own (assumedly latin script based) language. Use that as an opportunity and avoid the Latin alphabet altogether.
When learning French you don't have that opportunity so you're going to keep having to remind yourself that not a single character in a French word sounds like what it does on your native language.
I've seen this in action when learning Finnish, a long time ago, in a class full of expats. Most Germans had serious trouble with the ä, which sounds entirely different in Finnish than in German. They would consistently pronounce it like in German, which made them sound ridiculous. The rest of the class, whose native language alphabet didn't contain the ä, got their pronunciation much closer to the real thing. I can only imagine how powerful this is if not a single character, but the entire script, is different from your native language.
I'm not sure about Finnish but learning German and Czech as an English native the "uncanny valley" of familiar consonants (and familiar vowels with funky headgear) was only a stumbling block for the first few weeks or so in my experience.
Every now and then I'll mess up when reading out loud a "c" ("ts" in Czech) if I'm not paying attention, or writing "ch" instead of "č" - but that's pretty rare.
It's not the letters that mess me up, but the "false friends" - words that look similar to some in English and that can be a pretty big deal. I'm gonna write something in weird pseudo-code, because I can't express it cleanly in English.
German.ja == English.yes
Czech.já == English.me
So if you learned both Czech/German as a second language you can have moments of "wait, wtf!?" here and there. Also:
English.no == Czech.ne
English.yes == Czech.ano (shortened to "no")
So a Czech person agreeing to go for a beer with you might say "no" meaning "yes". There's some other good ones in Czech actually - the word "poluce" looks like "pollution" but actually means "emission of semen in sleep".
If it sounds like I'm complaining then I'm not - I love all this weirdness :)
* = actually reflection and cases make this more complicated still - could also be mého/mému/mém/mým/své/svého/svému/svém/svým depending on context
"Recorded since the 1340s, as "discharge of semen other than during sex", later, "desecration, defilement" (1382), from Late Latin pollutio (“defilement”)"
Other half is Hungarian, she often uses "Not" in place of "No", "Did you make it to the school on time?" "Not".
Turns out that in Hungarian No/Not == Nem so when she translates it in her head she uses No/Not interchangeably and it's flip a coin on what comes out, I find it endearingly cute, "Did you remember the milk?" "Not!".
I still confuse her with "aye" as an affirmative yes (I'm from Yorkshire in England and we still use aye and to a lesser extent 'nay' as an emphatic no).
> English and French spelling is as far removed from each other as anything.
English integrated many words from other languages, incl French -- due to migration, conquests etc. English people had the tendency to retain the original spelling but to pronounce the foreign words english. It is interesting to compare this to Spanish where, in many cases, foreign words are spelled differently but most often the original pronunciation is approximately retained.
>Alphabet is the only official way to type out pronunciation of mainland Chinese, so trying to avoid the alphabet for Chinese is basically impossible.
Chinese schoolchildren learn Pinyin before they learn Hanzi. Romanisation is only a problem if you're under the false assumption that these letters mean what you think they mean. It isn't hard to internalise the idea that j, x and q represent completely alien sounds that you must learn to recognise and reproduce.
> As for Japanese, the kana alphabet can be transcribed to Alphabet without information loss
Not quite true in reverse - lead and read, for example, would have the same kana but are different in english. That said, yeah I totally agree, there is nothing wrong with using the alphabet if you are mindful that there is a different phonetic 'mapping.'
English and French spelling is as far removed from each other as anything. Anybody learning a foreign language will have to come to terms with the fact that the letters work slightly-to-moderately different for each language, whether those are European or Asian languages. Danish and Swedish are practically dialects of each other, but the spelling and pronunciation are miles apart. Trying to read one with the usage of the other will sound as stilted as any transliteration of any "non-alphabet" language.
Alphabet is the only official way to type out pronunciation of mainland Chinese, so trying to avoid the alphabet for Chinese is basically impossible.
Vietnamese, like several other Asian languages is Alphabet with diatrics, so again, you have to use Alphabet. There is nothing magical about Asian languages that gets contaminated by the Alphabet.
As for Japanese, the kana alphabet can be transcribed to Alphabet without information loss, so it is in no way a poor substitute. You also have to learn romanisations in order to type on a keyboard.
The bottom line is, you have to learn new sounds when learning a new language and you have to learn new spelling. shi in Japanese or Chinese are quite close to English, at least compared to how close ta is to the English pronunciation of "shi", so the alphabet acts as a nice mnemonic structure for learners.