[ue_]

>Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder.

This is the exact problem with learning Japanese using roumaji (rouma ji = roman character; ローマ字), because you of course start to read the latin script with your starting accent (assuming of course your first language is written using the latin alphabet).

However some textbooks persist with using it, despite being excellent otherwise (Japanese: The Spoken Language being one). I can't stress enough the need to move off reading Latin characters. It is also useful to learn the characters by sound rather than their roman equivalents. i.e instead of learning that ロ is "ro", you could learn it by listening: https://youtu.be/aLEtZ2CRoho?t=1m53s

The mental association is everything.

[_samihasan_]

Well, I must say that I fail to see the rationale of this argument as I speak other European languages and I haven't encountered this problem before.

The mental process goes like this; I identify the language of text let's say Spanish and then like a switch in my brain is turned on for the Spanish pronunciation and then I proceed to read the text using the rules of the Spanish language while English is totally disabled.

This is not like unique to me as I observed other students with the same process. I can't really say that the issue you described is a universal issue for all language learners worldwide.

[ue_]

I think the case is different for languages that use the same script, such as a European language learner learning another European language. The learner must learn to switch "modes" and this is reinforced all the time by any kind of reading, because the learner has no choice but to switch modes.

However this mode switching is not reinforced in the case where the script (in this case the Japanese script) is not latin-based.

I think I'm trying to say that native speakers of latin-based languages who are learning latin-based languages have to learn to change their mode of pronunciation, whereas if they were to learn a non-latin-based language they don't (and shouldn't) learn this at all, because in the long run it isn't useful.

[alirazaq]

Except romaji isn't used to teach pronunciation, it's meant to help the student read while they are still getting familiar with kana; much like furigana for kanji.

Japanese characters have one pronunciation in all circumstances (excluding diacritical modifications). Respectively in romaji, consonants and vowels will always have the same pronunciation. Compare that to American English where accents have been removed and even native speakers can have trouble pronouncing new words.

[ue_]

>Except romaji isn't used to teach pronunciation

I know, but students will continue to treat it as a pronunciation guide anyway, unless told specifically how to pronounce otherwise. It's especially bad when the Japanese is supported by romaji way into the course, which fosters laziness in the student.

[empath75]

unvoiced vowels at the end of sentences sometimes get dropped in Japanese 'です' (more 'dess' than 'desu'). So it's not entirely consistent.