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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years
elif wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
Awesome. Learning Japanese as an English speaker was already
ridiculously overcomplicated. So pumped to do it all over again.
SpecialistK wrote 20 hours 45 min ago:
I think it's your English-language comprehension which needs some
brushing up. The only change here is that the Japanese government is
moving to the same romanization system that most people and
businesses already use. And if you've already learned Japanese,
including kanji and kana, nothing changes at all.
dhruv3006 wrote 1 day ago:
I read romantic rules.
nephihaha wrote 1 day ago:
The current Romaji system is pretty decent, unlike Pinyin or the Korean
transliteration system... Or Arabic romanisation which seems to be all
over the place. (Yes, I know Arabic is an abjad.)
apflkx wrote 1 day ago:
Transcription gets even messier when more than two languages are
involved. Russian uses the Polianov system as a "cyrillization" method.
It's neither Hepburn nor Kunrei-shiki, which can be confusing if you
are a Russian Language learner and know Japanese or English.
Some Japanese words entered Russian not directly, but through English.
In these cases, the word is first romanized using Hepburn, and then
adapted to Russian using English-to-Russian rules. A classic example is
寿司, which Polianov would render as суси (susi), but Russ…
mostly know as суши (sushi). Then there are words which actually do
faithfully follow Polianov, as in 新宿, which is written as
Синдзуку (Sindzuku) instead of ШинджÑ�…
xnikitin wrote 1 day ago:
Minor corrections:
1. It's "Polivanov", not "Polianov".
2. It's "Синдзюку", not "СиндзуÐ�…
Another example of JP→EN→RU is Nintendo's character Yoshi:
By Polivanov, it should have become "Ёси" but since it came to RU
via EN, it is written as "Йоши".
apflkx wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks for the correction!
しんじゅく (Cиндзюку, Sindzyuku) …
case, as it has both し and じゅ in it. This is where Polivanov
is similar to Kunrei. OTOH, Fukushima is cyrillized as
Фукусима (Fukusima), where the ふ is a fu in H…
in Kunrei and fu in Polivanov but し is not shi as in Hepburn, but
si as in Kunrei.
hilbert42 wrote 1 day ago:
"The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し,
じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of
si, zi and tu."
As a Westerner I know very little Japanese but having worked in Japan
for a short while I take an interest in the language.
When reading this it occurred to me there might have been more reason
for adopting the Hepburn spelling than stated. As as English speaker
I've noticed how poorly we pronounce Japanese words and perhaps this
change is also intended as a subtle way of letting us know.
English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages
then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to
take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of
language arrogance.
Foe example, I've long complained about the adoption in recent decades
of the word tsunami into English and then mangling its pronunciation
beyond recognition.
I'm old enough to remember when 'tidal wave' was the generally accepted
wording for that ocean phenomenon—now we've replaced these perfectly
understandable and descriptive English words with tsunami, which to
English speakers is both seemingly unpronounceable and conveys no
meaningful description in English.
Right, the introduction of the unpronounceable tsunami into English
unnecessarily increased the entropy of the language a notch further.
Why, for what purpose? Seems to me the only plausible reason is more
because of erudite snobbishness than out of any practical utilitarian
reason.
That said, I'm not opposed to English stealing words from foreign
languages when it makes sense, for example the German zeitgeist is a
wonderful expressive replacement for the spirit of the times, similarly
translating say gedankenexperiment is straightforward but we don't do
so as the word has a rich contextual meaning for physicists both in
English and other languages. Thus, it's best left as is.
Back to tsunami. Whenever I hear the word mispronounced by those who
ought to know better it just grates badly, the mangled mispronunciation
distracts my attention from what's actually being said. So often one
hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur the word as
'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates the correct
pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing snake—say it to
yourself. Is that not obvious?
Fashion should not be the reason for stealing foreign words but rather
because it makes sense to do so. Moreover, we should be respectful of
the languages from whence these words came. Perhaps the adoption of the
Hepburn spellings is a Japanese hint suggesting that we try a little
harder.
throw0101a wrote 1 day ago:
> English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages
then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy
to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of
language arrogance.
First, there is more than one English: British (plus England,
Scotland, etc), American, Australian, Indian, etc.
Second, each language has its own way of doing things, and so words
would be pronounced according to the rules of the context of the
language that is being used. Should the Japanese pronounce "tempura"
the way the Portuguese do, given that the Japanese got the idea from
them? Or should a Japanese speaker pronounce it "properly" for the
Japanese, and a Portuguese speaker properly for that language?
> So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur
the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates
the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing
snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious?
Welcome to the world of accents.
Also worth considering that the fact that English does not really
care about accents (or tones) to convey meaning helps non-native
speakers use it. Two ESL people can probably communicate well enough
to get messages across. (Probably handy for English being the modern
lingua franca.)
MalikTerm wrote 1 day ago:
It's an interesting choice to suggest that the switch to Hepburn
romanisation was motivated for a desire to better help English
speakers pronounce Japanese words when tsunami is your example. The
official Kunrei-shiki romanisation for つなみ is 'tunami', and I
can promise you that nobody who visits Japan tells their friends and
family that they visited Mount Huzi (ふじ). You would have a point
if you had chosen something like Mitutoyo, but even then names are
usually the exception when it comes to romanisation/anglicisation as
official rules are less applicable, cf. Mitsubishi.
Still, something like 'sooonami' is particularly grating even if we
ignore the pretentious BBC accent (I have heard tsu-na-mi on BBC
shows to be fair). It could be because as you said the onset gets
simplified to better fit English phonotactics like with other words:
(ph)thalic acid, (p)terodactyl, kr(w)asan (croissant) in American
English with a doubly 'wrong' t at the end, (k)nife, (g)nome,
sometimes (g)nu, etc, but I don't think this is it. Su-na-mi sounds
fine and this is how it's pronounced in Spanish and some other
languages too, every language ends up 'mispronouncing' words if it
doesn't fit nicely into the existing phonology. I think what bothers
me the most about 'sooonami' is the stress inevitably gets placed on
the second syllable which becomes 'nah' in non-rhotic accents which
just sounds wrong, and in terms of Japanese phonology it's rare to
place the stress on the middle syllable, never mind that the mora is
wrong and the pitch accent is wrong, but I by no means speak
Japanese.
As for why English even uses tsunami in the first place, maybe 'tidal
wave' makes sense if that's what you grew up with or you live in a
part of the world at risk of tsunamis, but I don't think I made the
connection until I was an adult. Are all tides not waves? Tidal bore,
tidal flood, storm wave, etc, sure, unusual events relating to the
tide or weather, tidal wave fits if we ignore that they're not caused
by the tide, but it doesn't seem comparable to me even if tidal wave
isn't wrong and is synonymous.
hilbert42 wrote 6 hours 5 min ago:
"Kunrei-shiki romanisation for つなみ is 'tunami' "
I selected tsunami because of its very common usage and rapid rise
in English (I'm old enough to watch it happen), and that most
English speakers pronounce it differently to its accepted English
spelling.
I've actually discussed the pronunciation with native Japanese
speakers and several have told me that the correct pronunciation is
somewhere between tsu and tu, the tsu is too hard and the tu too
soft. That's another debate for linguists and language experts
which I am not.
My post and follow-up reply are principally aimed at English and
English speakers and language training in anglophone countries. As
I mentioned, pronunciation matters because for many people upon
hearing a word mispronounced it takes additional time to mentally
process it which distracts from what is being said.
The real issue here is not whether that some linguist translated
the word with tsu or tu but rather that once the romanisation was
agreed upon then there ought to be an agreed pronunciation based on
that spelling. That's principally my point.
No doubt tsu is uncommon in other English spellings but the usage
of the word tsunami is very common so it ought to be incumbent on
public speakers to pronounce it correctly. I believe this comes
down to poor language training. Why training matters can be
inferred from my other imported word zeitgeist, pronouncing it is
never a problem because English is a Germanic language, thus it has
common roots with German. Again I'd stress I'm not a linguist and
my objection is purely practical, I find bad pronouncation very
distracting.
I think your use of (ph)thalic acid, (p)terodactyl, etc. is
stretching it a bit. These scientific and technical words are not
as in as common useage (on the say the daily news) as tsunami is
but I concede their usage is growing. It's unfair to criticize
people who cannot pronounce strange and or uncommon words at least
without some practice. I spent years studying organic chemistry and
I still have difficulty in pronouncing some of the rarer functional
groups. Take a look at the official IUPAC list of chemical names, I
defy most experienced chemists to pronounce many of those names
upon first sight.
Re your point about the strangeness of English spelling and
pronunciation, (k)nife, (g)nome, etc., that's a whole new subject
which I've not time to discuss here execpt to say if you don't
already watch the YouTube channels Robwords and Words Unravelled
then you ought to do so. Anyone interested in words and language
would find them most interesting.
Edit: I forgot to mention the meaning of the expression 'tital
wave' was taught to us at a very eary age and it had the same
meaning and connotation as tsunami. We learned about tidal waves in
social studies in primary school. I'm surprised this was even
raised as knowledge about the term across the population was so
well known that querying it would have been considered strange. It
seems tsunami has done more damage to our language that I'd have
thought.
numpad0 wrote 1 day ago:
> we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly
On that part: as anecdotal as it is, as a lifelong native Japanese
speaker myself, I can't pronounce random 日本語 appearing in the
middle of English sentence without ceasing speech and partially
"rebooting" my brain in the Japanese mode. And therefore, I don't
really take an American or whoever non-native saying Japanese
sooonahrmeey as particularly disrespectful or upsetting.
Some people get really upset when I'd say different languages
implement thought processes, speech recognition, and speech
pronunciation processes differently - but that's what languages are.
So it's what it is.
As for use of tsunami over tidal waves, I'd agree that the latter is
perfectly fine. Sprinkling tsunamis everywhere in media do feel a bit
too clickbaity.
hilbert42 wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
Thank for your comment. I understand the difficulty Japanese
speakers have in saying some phonemes in English and that's natural
because of fundamental differences in the languages.
When listening to a Japanese (or any nonnative speaker) speaking
in English I'm particularly tolerant because of my own difficulty
speaking in a foreign language, I have difficulty with French
pronunciation for example.
What I'm riled up about here is that English speakers can easily
pronounce Tsu just by saying the letters as they are written. Yes,
in English speaking letters t, s and u in sequence is uncommon but
perfectly doable, one only has to be mindful and most people are
not. Sure, English speakers do have legitimate difficulty in
pronouncing certain phonemes and structures in some foreign
languages (glides in Chinese for instance) but the Japanese Tsu is
not one of them.
There's much that can be said about why English speakers pay little
attention to many aspects of their own language but in short I'd
put much of it down to it being the common lingua franca and bad to
almost appalling language education in much of the anglophone
world.
It would be nice if English speakers weren't so cocky about their
language and realized that most of the world speaks different
languages other than their own.
graemep wrote 1 day ago:
> English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages
then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy
to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of
language arrogance.
Other languages do the same to English words. Lots of words have been
borrowed and borrowed again across multiple languages changing
pronunciation each time.
> Why, for what purpose? Seems to me the only plausible reason is
more because of erudite snobbishness than out of any practical
utilitarian reason.
Possibly because the term tidal wave is misleading as it has nothing
to do with tides?
> for example the German zeitgeist
That is a great word.
> So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC
The BBC used to be very good at this a long time ago now. I believe
they got rid of the unit that provided the guidance on the
pronunciation of foreign words.
discomrobertul8 wrote 1 day ago:
> Back to tsunami. Whenever I hear the word mispronounced by those
who ought to know better it just grates badly, the mangled
mispronunciation distracts my attention from what's actually being
said. So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC
slur the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling
indicates the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing
snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious?
It's because English has no (or very few - I can't think of any)
words that begin with the same phoneme.
That's just what happens with loan words. Japanese loaned "Arbeit"
(アルバイト) from German and they also pronounce it "wro…
hilbert42 wrote 7 hours 33 min ago:
"It's because English has no (or very few - I can't think of any)
words that begin with the same phoneme."
True, but I reckon it's more than that—read my reply to numpad0.
"Japanese loaned "Arbeit" (アルバイト) from German and…
also pronounce it "wrong"."
Question: is that because of structural diffences between the
languages (as I mentioned above) that make some foreign phonemes
difficult to pronounce? If so, that's different to English speakers
who can pronounce Tsu.
MalikTerm wrote 1 day ago:
>It's because English has no (or very few - I can't think of any)
words that begin with the same phoneme.
Loan words, but: Tsar (zar or sar), Tswana (50/50), and Tsetse fly
(usually /ts/) from the Tswana language. I don't think /ts/ ever
refers to something specific in native English, it's usually
plurals like it-s or from suffixes like bet-sy, gats-by, wat-son.
SV_BubbleTime wrote 1 day ago:
crackles knuckles
I have Real Real Japan on my YouTube algorithm. So, I’m a bit of an
expert on this topic…
mc3301 wrote 1 day ago:
How about Dogen?
donatj wrote 1 day ago:
Is been 25 years since I took Japanese in highschool but I'm relatively
certain that our textbooks had ち romanized as tchi which from my
recollection seems more accurate to its actual common pronunciation.
bentley wrote 1 day ago:
“tchi” is the Hepburn romanization of っち. (Knowing very
little Japanese myself, the first example that comes to mind is
たまごっち → tamagotchi.)
ptx wrote 1 day ago:
Perhaps only in the case where it's preceded by the small tsu? E.g.
"一人ぼっち" -> "hitori bo[tsu]chi" -> "hitori botchi"? …
what Wikipedia says [1], although I think it's also common to
(incorrectly?) use "bocchi" instead.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Long_cons...
mc3301 wrote 1 day ago:
I have seen chi and ti, both of which when qwerty typed on standard
windows or mac produce ち. I have never seen it as tchi.
つ is often seen as tu or tsu.
I have been in Japan for over a decade.
belviewreview wrote 1 day ago:
About a decade ago, I became a fan of the remarkable Japanese child
prodigy drummer Kanade Sato. That lead to me to learn the surprising
fact that Japan has 4 writing systems: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and
romanji.
Here's the video that got me interested in Sato
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpFL08m5fQ&list=RDXYpFL08m5fQ&start_radio=1
flumpcakes wrote 1 day ago:
Impressive drumming skills!
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
"The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し,
じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of
si, zi and tu."
Is that an anti-China thing? Or is it a simplification thing?
I don't fully understand the underlying motivation.
brigandish wrote 1 day ago:
Kunrei makes more sense to a Japanese native, Hepburn makes more
sense to a non-Japanese native. As the article points out, Hepburn
has come to dominate, so they're simply aligning with it rather than
having two systems hanging around.
AdamH12113 wrote 1 day ago:
Some background for those who aren't familiar: "Romanization" refers to
converting Japanese sounds into the Latin (Roman) alphabet. In
Japanese, these sounds are written with phonetic characters called
kana. (There are two types of kana; I'm only going to talk about
hiragana here.) Each kana represents either a vowel or a consonant
followed by a vowel. For example: あ (a), こ (ko), ね (ne). Aside
from a terminating n/m sound (ん), there are no characters for
standalone consonants. There are five vowels (a i u e o).
The kana are usually written in a table where each row is a vowel and
each column is a consonant, like on Wikipedia[1]. Most columns of the
table have five characters, each representing the same consonant
combined with one of the vowels. For example: か/き/く/け/ぅ
ka/ki/ku/ke/ko, ま/み/む/め/も ma/mi/mu/me/mo. Some column…
"missing" sounds (や/ゆ/よ ya/yu/yo); but what's important for our
purposes is that some columns have irregular sounds:
さ/し/す/せ/そ sa/shi/su/se/so and た/ち/つ/ã…
ta/chi/tsu/te/to. There are no si, ti, or tu sounds in standard
Japanese; they have shi, chi, and tsu instead.
Using diacritic markings gets you more consonants. Most of these are
made by adding a couple tick marks to the corner of the character,
which makes the consonant voiced instead of unvoiced. For example: か
ka -> が ga, と to -> ど do, ひ hi -> び bi. But the irreg…
sounds stay irregular: し shi -> じ ji instead of zi, ち chi -> ã…
ji (again) instead of di, and つ tsu -> づ zu instead of du. (す su
-> ず zu gives the same sound but in a regular way.)
You can also combine i-vowel characters with y-consonant characters to
get sounds with consonant clusters: き ki + や ya = きゃ kya, …
mi + よ yo = みょ myo, etc. The irregular sounds remain irregular:
し shi + ゆ yu = しゅ shu (instead of syu), ち chi + ã‚�…
ちゃ cha (instead of tya), じ ji + よ yo = じょ jo (in…
zyo). There's a Reddit post with a nice table showing all the available
sounds[2].
Now the problem for romanization is this: Should the romanization
reflect the irregular sounds in the spoken language? Or should it
reflect the regular groupings of the kana characters? づ and ず might
both be pronounced "zu", but they come from different linguistic
origins, just as "bear" and "bare" do in English. The Hepburn system
uses spellings that match the sounds, while the current standard
(Kunrei-shiki) uses spellings that match the kana grouping: し si
(instead of shi), ち ti (instead of chi), じ zi (instead of ji), つ
tu (instead of tsu), じょ syo (instead of sho), etc.
The Hepburn system tells you how to pronounce the word[3] at the cost
of being a lossy encoding. For anyone familiar with the Latin alphabet,
that's almost always the better choice, and it's nearly universal in
the Western world. Kunrei-shiki does better reflect the underlying
structure of the Japanese language and its native writing system, which
is probably why the Japanese government preferred it. But anyone who
wants to learn the language is going to learn the kana almost
immediately (it's just a few hours with flash cards), so IMHO that's
pretty small advantage.
I deliberately didn't talk about long vowels, glottal stops, the
differences between hiragana and katakana, different pronunciations of
ん (n), or how to handle ん (n) followed by a vowel, but if you're
curious about Japanese romanization those topics may also be of
interest to you. I can try to explain more if anyone's curious. [1] [2]
[3] Most of the consonants are the same as English or close enough and
are trivial to write in the Latin alphabet. The big exception is
ら/り/る/れ/ろ, normally written ra/ri/ru/re/ro but it's n…
really the English r sound. See:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kana_chart_1.png
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/awzw04/kana_ta...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_taps_...
mc3301 wrote 1 day ago:
Should the romanization reflect the irregular sounds in the spoken
language? Or should it reflect the regular groupings of the kana
characters?
OR....
Should it reflect how one would type it on a keyboard in order to get
the correct Japanese characters
(ひらがな、カタカナ、漢字)?
aidenn0 wrote 1 day ago:
Anyone where the "ou" romanization for long o vowels comes from (e.g.
少年 being rendered as "shounen" rather than "shoonen" or "shōnen")?
[edit]
Wikipedia suggests it might be from Wāpuro rōmaji, where "u" is
always used to spell the kana "う"
mc3301 wrote 1 day ago:
Because 少年 in hiragana is しょうねん: spelled …
"sho u ne n"
Many, but not all long vowels in japanese follow these:
ああ a i -> as in おかあさん, mother
いい i i -> as in ちいさい, small
うう u u -> as in すう, to smoke
えい e i -> as in せんせい, a teacher
おう o u -> as in こうえん, a park
Yes, exceptions to this exist (like おお) and some are actually
dipthongs and not actually long-vowels, but easier to think of them
like that.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Look at the standard kana table:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goj%C5%ABon
kagevf wrote 1 day ago:
Wikipedia is right; the romanization is just matching how it's
rendered in kana.
eatsleepmonad wrote 1 day ago:
The language school I attended all but banned romanization. The idea
was to learn, practice, and finally internalize kana and kanji as
quickly as possible. Hepburn is just a band-aid when it comes to
language study.
For people not interested in learning Japanese, however, a unified
romanization could have its benefits. It just never struck me as
particularly inconsistent to begin with, even after so many years
living there.
wodenokoto wrote 1 day ago:
There’s another school of teaching, where kana and kanji are banned
for the first 2-3 semesters because they are a distraction to learn
and internalize words and grammar.
I’ve met a few students of this textbook system when I was on
exchange and my impression was that they were very skilled at
Japanese for the amount of time they’ve been a student and what
they told about their seniors was they pick up kanji fast, since they
already know the words.
The big problem of course is that it is completely incompatible with
other schools. Where do you place them when they go on exchange? With
the n3 or n5 students?
Anyway, I always thought it was interesting that the exact antithesis
of RTK* exists and works.
*RTK or “remembering the kanji” is a system that teaches all
kanji before student learn their first word. It’s quite popular
online as it lends itself very well to solo studying.
presentation wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
There’s another school of teaching, which bans all reading,
writing, and speaking altogether in favor of exclusively native
speaker verbal input for the first 6-12+ months of learning. Some
YouTubers seem to like the idea of this, though sounds pretty
extreme.
throwaway2037 wrote 1 day ago:
> *RTK or “remembering the kanji” is a system that teaches all
kanji before student learn their first word. It’s quite popular
online as it lends itself very well to solo studying.
For those unaware, the OP probably means this three part series:
[1] One thing I have found over the years, I have never met a
foreigner living in Japan who has used it extensively. (Many were
aware of it, but few used it heavily.) However, there is a lively
community of online learners who use it. (Don't read that as a
judgement against using it; this is simply an observation.)
I was surprised to read this part:
> a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their
first word
I have never heard this description before. I always thought it
was a learning aid to use mnemonics to remember the meaning of
individual kanji. If someone can complete all volumes of RTK
before "learn[ing] their first word", I would be stunned. It would
be a feat of super-human level of memorization and recall. That
said, the Internet is a huge place with billions of people. There
will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell
you about their success using it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji
wodenokoto wrote 1 day ago:
"all" might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the philosophy is to
learn to recognize roughly 2000 kanji before starting the actual
language learning. Volume 2 and 3 are supposed to complement more
normal language learning.
The theory is based on the authors experience seeing Chinese and
Korean students learn much, much faster than their western peers
in Japanese language classes, coupled with an argument for "If
you can read 50% of characters, you still can't read"
I'm surprised you've never come across this, as it is in the
foreword.
> There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is
happy to tell you about their success using it.
I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a
summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home
university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and
after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not
N2 - this was before they added the N)
Good for him. He was a strong student, but I wouldn't recommend
it.
throwaway2037 wrote 16 hours 57 min ago:
> I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he
spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at
his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two
semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he
passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)
While I certainly believe your story, I hope that you know he
is an extreme outlier with super-human level of memorization
and recall. Tiny question: Do you know if his uni with in the
countryside or a big city? The people whom I have met that
gained fluency the fastest (normies here, no superhumans,
please!) all had significant time lived in the countryside, so
they had an immersive language learning experience.
wodenokoto wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
Now that you mentioned it, he did spend time at a language
program out in the sticks before I met him.
But still impressive.
ehnto wrote 1 day ago:
I have always felt furigana bridges that gap well enough in written
learning. The downside is that it might become a crutch, but it
can't for long if you are serious about learning reading. Native
materials pretty quickly drop furigana.
Like with a lot of things like this, if you learn for long enough
the differences in the major approaches work themselves out.
throwaway2037 wrote 1 day ago:
About 25 years ago, I studied Hebrew. It is a fascinating
language to me (as is Arabic). One of the features, weirdly
similar to furigana, is the "dots" placed above vowels to
indicates how to pronouce words. (Sorry, I don't know the
technical linguistic term to describe these dots.) In regular
texts, these dots are excluded, and readers are expected to
(essentially) have the dots memorized. I always struggled to
read Hebrew text without the dots.
In the last 10 years in Japan, more and more goverment documents
are now available with furigana. Sometimes the edition is called
"Friendly Japanese" (yasashii nihongo / やさしい日æ…
The best explaination I can think of: There has been a dramatic
rise in the number of non-university-educated foreign workers who
have come to Japan on labor contracts -- factory workers, farm
workers, hotel staff, shop staff, etc. They need to live their
daily lives in Japan, but will struggle with native-level
Japanese documents, so the gov't (both national and local) make
an effort to reduce this friction. I expect the level of support
from local gov'ts will be very much correlated to the number of
foreign workers in their districts.
sandbach wrote 1 day ago:
Those vowel diacritics in Semitic languages are called matres
lectionis.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis
mcmoor wrote 11 hours 15 min ago:
I thought he's talking about what in Arabic is called harakat
[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_diacritics
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics
bertylicious wrote 1 day ago:
They are called diacritics.
kevin_thibedeau wrote 1 day ago:
Kunrei-shiki is intended for domestic Japanese use. That's why it
results in spellings that don't make logical sense for any
Latin-based phonology. It's too focused on round trip unambiguity at
the cost of phonetic clarity for non-Japanese. My big peeve is the
company Mitutoyo using K-S, which everyone mispronounces because they
don't know it's a poor transcription of "Mitsutoyo".
ehnto wrote 1 day ago:
Oh! That's fun to learn, given where I am from (not Japan) we all
call it "Mi-chu-toy-o". A combination of misunderstanding and
dialect.
akst wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah my impression was the Orthography is pretty consistent compared
to English.
From what I understand this isn't the first time they've made some
kind of change to orthography, I remember reading something about
updating offical use of certain kana to reflect more modern
pronunciations. It wasn't a dramatic change.
It's interesting to see some countries just have this centralised
influence over something like how their language is written as
they're the main ones speaking it, as opposed to English.
throwaway2037 wrote 1 day ago:
> Yeah my impression was the Orthography is pretty consistent
compared to English.
As a native English speaker, I have learned this watching
non-natives try to learn English spelling over the years. It is
hell! I studied French in middle school and high school. I
remember there being a similar level of ambiguity in their
orthography (similar to English).
One weird thing that I have noticed when Japanese native speakers
write emails in English: Why don't they use basic spell check? I'm
talking about stuff as basic as: "teh" -> "the". Spell checkers
from the early 1990s could easily correct these issues. To be
clear, I rarely have an issue to understand the meaning of their
emails (as a native speaker, it is very easy to skip over minor
spelling and grammar mistakes), but I wonder: Why not spell check
before you send?
astrobe_ wrote 23 hours 20 min ago:
> As a native English speaker, I have learned this watching
non-natives try to learn English spelling over the years. It is
hell! I studied French in middle school and high school. I
remember there being a similar level of ambiguity in their
orthography (similar to English).
Yes. I think english is even slightly worth than french wrt
spelling/sound mismatches, but you can call me biased. Moreover,
William the Conqueror, who brought civilization to England, also
brought the inconsistencies of the french spelling with him.
> I wonder: Why not spell check before you send?
Well, some of my coworkers don't either, from french to french.
And up to recently in most programs it was a bother to switch
back and forth between 2 languages.
But really, that's probably about common laziness; the typos you
mention can be caught by proof-reading before sending, which can
also catch other mistakes like missing words or inconsistent
sentences caused rewrites.
Proof-reading just after writing is not the best tho, as you tend
to skip words because it is "too fresh". I try to introduce some
time gap between the too (for instance, proof-reading after lunch
or the next morning).
the_gipsy wrote 1 day ago:
La li lu le lo?
mc3301 wrote 1 day ago:
There's a beach called "らららサンビーチ" in…
While driving there, you can pass a signs that say "LaLaLa Sun Beach"
as well as "RaRaRa Sun Beach."
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
Curiously enough, Hepburn romanization fixes some ambiguities in
Japanese (Japanese written in kana alone) while introducing others.
The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オ…
That's an ambiguity.
Where does Hepburn disambiguate?
In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E,
like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē). The "SEI" is one unit. But in
other situations it does not, like in a compound word ending in the E
kana, where the second word starts with I. For instance 酒色 (sake +
iro -> sakeiro, not sakēro).
Hepburn distinguishes these; the hiragana spelling does not!
This is one of the issues that makes it very hard to read Japanese that
is written with hiragana only, rather than kanji. No word breaks and
not knowing whether せい is supposed to be sē or sei.
There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age"
(fried thing). A lot of the time it is pronounced as karāge, because
of the way RA and A come together. Other times you hear a kind of
flutter in it which articulates two A's.
I have no idea which romanization to use. Flip a coin?
presentation wrote 19 hours 31 min ago:
For what it’s worth as a long time learner of Japanese, none of
these ambiguities has ever confused me nor hindered my ability to be
perceived as natural to native speakers, so I think that this
ambiguity is not such a big deal.
To me, Hepburn’s strength relative to the old government
romanization is that it increases the likelihood that an English
speaker will make approximately the right sound when reading some
Romaji, and that people seem to prefer it in general.
innocentoldguy wrote 1 day ago:
> In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long
E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē).
While it is sometimes difficult to discern the combined E and I
sound, especially for non-native speakers, the word 先生 (sensei)
is technically pronounced "sensei" and should be spelled that way to
distinguish it from words with long E sounds, such as ええ (ee) and
お姉さん (oneesan). Similarly, the OU in 東京 (touky…
OO in 大きな (ookina) are different and should be spelled
differently. I hope this helps.
EDIT: Added a comma.
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, and in a Japanese song, "sensei" can yield four beats or
notes SE/N/SE/I.
But spelling out and singing aren't normal speech. Spelling/singing
can break apart diphthongs, like NAI becomes NA-I.
生 is not written with い due to the /e:/ having a different
sound from that one in from おねえさん. It does not (…
aren't spelling). It is written the way it is for ancient historic
reasons.
> Similarly, the OU in 東京 (toukyou) and the OO in 大きã…
(ookina) are different
No, they are't.
> I hope this helps.
こう言うバカな戯言は少しã…
ªã„んだぜ。
innocentoldguy wrote 1 day ago:
We are talking about writing/spelling, aren't we?
Why would you want to confuse the hell out of those learning
Japanese by spelling せんせい (sensei) using an E with a
macron, a la "sensē," when that is not at all how you spell it
or type in phonetically in an IME? Having a one-to-one
romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for
learners, who are essentially the target of romanized Japanese,
than creating a Hooked on Phonics version that is completely
disconnected from writing reality.
I also think your comment, written in Japanese, saying, "This
stupid nonsense isn't going to be of any use to anyone," is both
ignorant and uncalled for.
demetrius wrote 1 day ago:
> Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic
is far more logical for learners
It depends on the learner’s (and textbook author’s) goals.
Sometimes, having a phonetic transcription of the more common
pronunciation is a more important consideration.
Historically, Hepburn’s transcription pre-dates Japanese
orthographic reform. He was writing “kyō” back when it was
spelled けふ. Having one-to-one correspondence to kana was
not a goal.
So writing sensē is kinda on-brand (even if Hepburn didn’t
write like this, because in his times it still wasn’t
pronounced with long e).
tdeck wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
I think most learners probably only pick up maybe 50 words
before switching from romaji to kana anyway, so in the grand
scheme of things the romanization's correspondence to the
kana orthography isn't that important.
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
> E with a macron, a la "sensē,"
Sorry, yes. That is my mistake. Hepburn doesn't use any such ē
notation. Hepburn preserves えい and ええ as "ei" and …
conflating only "ou" and "oo" into ō (when they appear in a
combination that denotes the long o:).
demetrius wrote 1 day ago:
Some modern adaptations of his transcription do, however.
E.g. Modern Japanese Grammar: A Practical Guide uses the
transcription “sensee” (they consistently don’t use
macrons in this book: e.g. they use oo for ō, etc.).
Hepburn didn’t write “sensē” himself because it 18…
it was still pronounced “ei”, not “ē”. If it …
pronounced like it’s pronounced nowadays, you can bet
he’d spell it with ē.
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
sugē
ursAxZA wrote 1 day ago:
In plain-text romanization, the standard and expected spelling
is “sensei.”
That’s the formal, conventional representation, especially
for typing and learning.
Phonetically, in natural speech, the vowel often compresses
toward a long /e/ sound, so you may hear something closer to
sense or sensee depending on context and speaker.
In stylistic writing (e.g. light novels or dialogue), you might
occasionally see phonetic renderings to reflect speech, but in
formal or instructional contexts, “sensei” remains the
correct and expected form.
In short:
• Orthography: sensei
• Phonetics: can vary in actual speech
• Stylistic writing: sometimes bends toward pronunciation
Different layers, different purposes.
I think this may mostly be a case of people talking past each
other.
One side is focusing on orthographic convention (how it’s
written and typed),
the other on phonetic realization (how it’s actually
pronounced in speech).
Those aren’t contradictory claims — they’re just
different layers of the same thing.
innocentoldguy wrote 1 day ago:
Hi, ursAxZA. Yes, you're describing an "elision," which is
where speakers drop or blur sounds together to make speech
more fluid, like the way some people say, "Sup?" when they
mean, "What's up?" or replace the T with a glottal stop in
the word "mountain," as they do in Utah.
I wholeheartedly agree that it is fine to write things like
"Sup?" when appropriate, such as dialogue in a novel. You see
this all the time in Japanese TV, books, magazines, manga,
etc. However, I disagree that elisions should dictate how we
spell words in regular written communication, especially when
discussing a tool meant to help non-native Japanese speakers
learn the language. And as the parent poster pointed out,
when singing, you would sing "se n se i" rather than "se n se
e." The same is true of haiku and other instances where the
morae (linguistic beats similar to syllables in English) are
clearly enunciated.
As I said, sensei is technically four morae and different
than "sensē," and, in my opinion, should remain that way in
Romaji, it being a writing system and one method for
inputting Japanese text.
Thanks for the respectful conversation. I appreciate the
points you brought up.
ursAxZA wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks — and yes, I think we’re essentially aligned
now.
Once we separate the layers — orthography, pronunciation,
and stylistic rendering — the friction mostly disappears.
Romanization is a writing system with its own conventions;
speech naturally undergoes reductions and elisions;
and creative writing sometimes pulls closer to the spoken
register.
Different layers, different functions — and the confusion
only arises when they’re collapsed into one.
Appreciate the thoughtful discussion.
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
That's right. That ē thing was a pretty stupid gaffe I made.
ursAxZA wrote 1 day ago:
Calling out your own mistake takes toughness.
You owned it — that matters.
innocentoldguy wrote 1 day ago:
No worries, and I forgive you for the sardonic Japanese. I
wish you the best.
ursAxZA wrote 1 day ago:
> There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age"
(fried thing).
Slightly off-topic, but “karaage” (kara + age) isn’t “cr…
frying.”
The kara comes from a country name and refers to a style of cooking
— it’s a “country-name + cooking method” compound.
this is the commonly accepted explanation, though whether it’s
strictly historical or a later interpretation is still debated.
If you fry something without coating it, that’s usually called
“su” (plain) + “age” (frying) instead.
kazinator wrote 16 hours 15 min ago:
I somehow always keep forgetting that the kara part is that kanji
that looks like the one for sugar without the kome hen.
Still, that sort of thing in general still leaves room for it
having been word play. Like tempura being originally from
Portuguese, having nothing to do with 天.
Japanese spelling often plays gaslighting head games.
sho wrote 1 day ago:
> The kara comes from a country name and refers to a style of
cooking
My understanding is that the exact etymology is unknown. It's often
written with the letter that references the tang dynasty, but the
thing is there's no particular reason to think the Chinese
introduced the style of cooking to Japan - although it is true that
there was such a thing as fried chicken in 7th century China!
Another kanji-ization of the word uses the kara from karate
(meaning air or empty, in karate it's "empty hand") and I find this
equally plausible as karaage is fried with a very small amount of
batter ("in air").
Either way they're both essentially competing "kanji backronyms"
seeking to retcon an existing word as spoken; there's no real right
or wrong answer.
juancn wrote 1 day ago:
The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or ã‚…
That's an ambiguity.
What's the issue here? They all sound exactly the same, although
おお seems unusual. The choice of kana kinda depends on the what
you're writing.
drtgh wrote 1 day ago:
> What's the issue here?
You need to know previously the word to write from Hepburn to Kana
when "ō" is present because data is lost in such transliteration
from おう or おお or オー to Hepburn.
The internet is full of romanji written incorrectly with "o" alone
when it should be "ou" or "oo" due "ō" ASCII conversion errors at
one moment.
(The sooner a beginner embrace Hiragana and Katakana, the better)
retrac wrote 1 day ago:
In the phonetic alphabet it's /e:/ vs. /ei/ and /o:/ vs. /ou/.
If you're an English speaker, you can be forgiven for a very
stereotypical trait of the English accent. English speakers have a
real hard time with the /e/ or /e:/ sounds as well as the /o/ and
/o:/ sounds. Most English dialects don't have either a monophthong
/e/ or /o/. Both the long and short tend to get heard as /eɪ/ and
/oʊ/.
French enchanté /ɑ̃ ʃɑ̃ te/ is heard and borrowed as
/ɑn.ʃɑn.teɪ/. German gehen /ge:n/ is heard as "gain" /geɪn…
And Japanese /o:/ and /ou/ both get heard as /oʊ/.
It's arguably a minimal pair in Japanese: 負う /ou/ (to carry),
王 /o:/ (king).
Anon1096 wrote 1 day ago:
負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though. 方 …
¬ (hou vs hoo) is a better example. I don't really think native
speakers still distinguish these.
Feel free to try listening yourself though:
é ¬, note that it has multiple pronunciations but we only care
about hoo: [1] 方 [2] In some cases though there is still a
clear difference in pronunciation for most speakers, ex 塔 vs 遠
[1]: https://forvo.com/word/%E9%A0%AC/#ja
[2]: https://forvo.com/word/%E6%96%B9%E3%80%80%EF%BC%88%E3%81...
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
Nope! Writing 王 as "ou" is "wāpuro rōmaji" or modified
Hepburn. Proper Hepburn wants ō. Which cannot be used for è²
う.
decimalenough wrote 1 day ago:
> 負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though
No, it's ou vs ō.
_0ffh wrote 1 day ago:
Oh, I thought the added u and the bar were just two different
ways to indicated that the o is stretched (the u looking like
a workaround to avoid special characters).
uasi wrote 1 day ago:
> 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example.
As a native Japanese speaker, this example is eye-opening. I
hadn't even realized that the u in 方 is pronounced as /o:/
— I believe most Japanese people haven't either, despite
unknowingly pronounce it that way.
Also, I have no idea how to Hepburn-romanize 方 vs é ¬, è² �…
vs 王, and 塔 vs 遠. If I had to romanize, I would just
write it as whatever the romaji input method understands
correctly (hou/hoo, ou/ou, and tou/too, in this case).
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
Your comment is astonishing.
If you know the word 方, that it is /ho:/, and you know that
it has a う in it when written out, how can you not know
that う stands for making the o long? The only vowel is the
long o.
Japanese kindergarten kids can recognize hiragana words with
"おう", correctly identifying it as /o:/. By the time they
learn the 方 kanji they would have seen it written in
hiragana upmpteen times, like AよりBのほうが…
whatnot.
raincole wrote 1 day ago:
Because they're a native speaker. Native speakers are often
utterly oblivious to the 'rules' of their own languages.
Every time I read a rule about my mother tongue (Mandarin)
online I was like, lol what nonsense foreigners made up...
And then I realize that rule does exist. I just have
internalized it for so long.
pitkali wrote 1 day ago:
A typical example for English is the adjective order.
naniwaduni wrote 1 day ago:
Adjective order in English is basically that most
essential qualities of the object go closest to the
head. There are lists out there that try to break this
down into categories of adjective
("opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose
"), and to some extent the anglo intuitions on which
sorts of properties are more or less essential are not
trivial, but it's not as arbitrary as people want to
make it out to be.
SilasX wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
This. People act like it's a hyper-complicated rule
that English speakers magically infer, when in
reality, a) other languages do it, and b) it's a much
simpler rule (that you've given) which someone
overcomplicated.
As a counterexample (in line with your explanation),
consider someone snarking on the WallStreetBets
forum: "Come on, guys, this is supposed to be Wall
Street bets, not Wall Street prudent hedges!"
Adjective order changes because the intended
significance changes. (Normally it would be "prudent
Wall Street hedges".)
Side note: please don't nitpick about whether "Wall
Street" is functionally an adjective here. The same
thing would happen if the forum had been named
"FinancialBets".
Cpoll wrote 20 hours 25 min ago:
Isn't this a bad example? There's only one
adjective in "prudent hedges." Changing which noun
"prudent" acts on isn't a matter of adjective
order.
(I suppose Wall Street is a proper adjective, like
"New York pizza," but you said no nitpicking)
kazinator wrote 15 hours 39 min ago:
In compound noun phrases, nouns serve as
adjective-like modifiers.
By the way, modifying compounds generally must
not be plurals, to the extent that even pluralia
tantum words like scissors and pants get forced
into a pseudo-singular form in order to serve as
modifiers, giving us scissor lift and pant leg,
which must not be scissors lift and pants leg.
An example of a noun phrase containing many
modifying nouns is something like: law school
entrance examination grading procedure workflow.
The order among modifying nouns is semantically
critical and different from euphonic adjective
order; examples in which modifying nouns are
permuted, resulting in strange or nonsensical
interpretations, or bad grammar, are not valid
for demonstrating constraintsa mong the order of
true adjectives which independently apply to
their subject.
For instance, red, big house is strange and wants
to be big, red house. The house is independently
big and red.
This is not related to why entrance examination
grading procedure cannot be changed to
examination entrance grading procedure. The
modifiers do not target the head, but each other.
"entrance" applies to "examination", not to
"procedure" or "grading".
SilasX wrote 17 hours 40 min ago:
Did you read the second sentence of that
paragraph? The same thing would happen with a
legit adjective, like if the forum had been named
"FinancialBets": "Guys, this is financial bets,
not financial prudent hedges."
kazinator wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
People "overcomplicate" the rule because they find
counterexamples to the simple rule.
It's a fool's errand because the way human language
works is that people happily accept odd exceptions
by rote memory. So the rule simply says that there
exist these exceptions. Also, there is something
called euphony: speakers find utterances
questionable if they are not in some canonical form
they are used to hearing. For instance "black &
white" is preferred over "white & black".
The rules boil down to "what people are used to
hearing, regardless of the underlying grammar
offering other possibilities".
uasi wrote 1 day ago:
Well, speaking for myself, I internalized how う is
pronounced differently in different contexts when I was
young, and by now I've almost forgotten there's a
difference I need to be conscious of.
When I hear /ho:/ in a certain context, "ほう(方)"
immediately comes to mind, without noticing that what I
heard was a long o. To me it's just the う sound. And if
someone pointed to their face while saying /ho:/, I'd think
it's the お sound as in "ほお(頬)".
BalinKing wrote 1 day ago:
Could you elaborate on the last sentence? Wiktionary claims
they're pronounced the same modulo pitch accent, but
Wiktionary's phonetic transcriptions are (mostly?)
auto-generated AFAIK.
uasi wrote 1 day ago:
塔 can be pronounced as tou, too, or somewhere between the
two. It depends on the speaker, speaking style, and possibly
dialect. Either way, Japanese speakers rely more on context
and pitch accent than actual pronunciation, so it
communicates fine.
Lightkey wrote 1 day ago:
> as tou, too, or somewhere between the two.
I see what you did there.
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
> 塔 can be pronounced as tou
No it can't, unless someone is spelling it out, or singing
it in a song where it is given two notes, or just
hyper-correcting their speech based on their knowledge of
writing.
Annoyed speech and such can break words into their morae
for empahsis, which breaks up dipthongs.
E.g. angry Japanese five-year-old:
ga kkō ni i ki ta ku nā i!!! (I don't wanna go to
school!!!)
"nā i" is not the regular way of saying "nai". The idea
that "nai" has that as an alternative pronunciation is a
strawman.
uasi wrote 1 day ago:
You're right. I looked up 現代仮名遣いã…
for the first time, and it says 塔（とう） is
officially pronounced as "too". I had it backwards - I
thought that 塔 is "tou", but due to the varying sounds
of う, people could (and often preferred to) pronounce
it as "too" in everyday speech.
This kind of misconception seems not uncommon. There's an
FAQ on NHK's website [1] that addresses the question of
whether 言う（いう） is pronounced "iu" …
The answer is "yuu", and the article make it clear that:
"It's not that [iu] is used for polite/careful speech and
[yuu] for casual speech - there is no such distinction."
I think native speakers learn words by hearing them and
seeing them written in hiragana, before learning the
underlying rules, so they know "too" is written as
とう, but might not realize that とう shouldn't …
pronounced as "tou" or いう as "iu". These are at least
less obvious than cases like は in こんにち�…
being "ha".
Personally, if I heard someone say 塔 as "tou" or 言ぅ
as "iu", I probably wouldn't count it as incorrect, nor
would I even notice the phonetic difference.
[0] [1]
[1]: https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/jo...
[2]: https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/201...
makeitdouble wrote 1 day ago:
The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with
financial impact.
Like how many people end up with the same romanized name while
being distinct in other alphabets. Then discrepancies between the
different systems because they usually are sloppy on the handling
of these matters.
Now that most stuff is electronic, these small differences can have
wider effects and be a PITA to fix.
throwaway2037 wrote 1 day ago:
> The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff
with financial impact.
Do you have evidence of this? Else, I doubt it. Most official
documents will also require your residence address. If you are
signing any official documents, they will check your zairyu or My
Number card for both photographic similarity, romaji (roman
character) spelling of your name, and residence address. All of
these in combination can easily uniquely identify a foreign
resident in Japan.
makeitdouble wrote 1 day ago:
You're looking at the checks done by a human. And I'd argue
those are already problematic enough, yes I've heard of first
hand stories of people stuck at the airport explaining that the
spelling on they passport and their reservation name being
different. People pay attention on international flights now,
but still fall for the other traps. I remember a guy buying
concert tickets with the most common spelling and getting stuck
at the gate as they had nothing on them matching it.
The worst part is the automated checks, and sure it's a huge
PITA. I've spent 1h30 last weekend at a docomo shop to have my
name recognized by their system, with the guy looking at the
papers and not understanding why it wouldn't do it. That's with
near perfect matching between the documents. Imagine having
spellings mismatched.
Banks also have a different matching system (Katakana based,
with a string length limit, for account matching, and another
WTF system for card owner matching), which is screwed in its
very own way. That's one of the main reasons for the debacle
with the MyNumber Card bank account matching last year.
> uniquely identify a foreign resident
Uniquely being identified is the easy part. Being _properly_
identified is something else altogether.
timr wrote 1 day ago:
They’re not the same. おう is discernible from おお, …
difference can be important.
That said, this is far from the most important problem in Japanese
pronunciation for westerners, and at speed the distinction between
them can become very subtle.
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, for instance こうり （小売）is complete…
from こおり （氷）.
If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a
different /o:/, you are laughably wrong.
It is not reliably discernible as a statistical fact you can
gather from a population sample of native speakers over many
words, if they are asked to speak normally (not using spelling as
emphasis, or using the words in a song).
timr wrote 1 day ago:
> If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is
a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong.
There's literally a different sound, which is why the
difference in kana exists. Disagree if you like -- as I said,
it's subtle -- but I don't know why you feel the need to be
insulting about it. Writing an inaccurate non-kana symbol for
the two sounds is no more an argument than saying that the
sounds are identical because they share a common romanization.
There are some words where you can more clearly hear the
difference than others. Consider, for example, the
pronunciation of 紅茶, vs your example of æ°·. It's not wro…
to pronounce the former as a long o, but you can hear the
difference when natives say it. Similarly, こういう is…
said as こおいう, and 公園 is not こお…
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
The difference in kana was not recently selected in order to
represent a feature of the contemporary language. It is
historic!!!
z500 wrote 1 day ago:
I think the confusion here is in the placement of the
vowels. おお and おう do sound identical when
pronounced as a single unit, but the おう in 小売
(こ.うり) isn't a single unit, it's just a お that
happens to be next to a う
timr wrote 12 hours 0 min ago:
This might be true. I’ve never thought about it deeply
enough!
rokob wrote 1 day ago:
I’m new to the language and thought these would be the same.
But I just listened to some words with the two and the おお
definitely has like a bigger o sound. That’s quite subtle.
timr wrote 1 day ago:
You’ll hear it more easily with time. It’s hard to
completely separate stuff like this from context (i.e. it’s
far more rare to have a collision in sound that makes sense if
you know the rest of the sentence), but it does matter for
discriminating between words when you’re trying to look words
up, for example.
kazinator wrote 16 hours 38 min ago:
I've never heard of the /o:/ of おう and おお being
different. I've never seen a small child, or foreign speaker,
being corrected in this matter; i.e that they are using the
wrong /o:/ for the word and should make it sound like this
instead.
This is literally not a thing that exists outside of some
foreigners' imaginations. You will sooner hear a difference
from $1000 speaker cables before you hear this, and it will
only be if you are the one who paid.
You may be letting by pitch accent deceive you. In words that
contain /o:/ it's possible for that to be a pitch boundary so
that pitch rises during the /o:/ and that can contrast
against another /o:/ word where that doesn't happen.
The é ¬ word in Japanese is "kinda funny" in that it has a
ほお variant and a ほほ variant. It has always stood…
in my mind as peculiar. I'd swear I've heard an in-between
"ほ・お" that sound somewhat reminiscent of "uh oh", with
a bit of a volume dip or little stop that makes it sound like
two /o/ vowels. It could be that the speaker intends ほほ,
but the second /h/ sound is not articulated clearly. It may
even be that the ほほ spelling was invented to try to
represent this situation (which is a wild guess, based on
zero research). In any case, the situation with that cheeky
little word doesn't establish anything general about
おお/こお/そお/とお...
I've been fooled by my imagination. For instance, many years
ago I thought I would swear that I heard the object marker
を sound like "WO" in some songs; i.e. exactly how it typed
in romaji-based input methods, because it belongs to the わ
group. Like "kimi-o" sounding like "kimi-wo". Today I'm
convinced it is just a kind of 空耳 (soramimi). Or the
artifact of /i/ followed by /o/ without interruption,
becoming a dipthong that passes through /u/: it may be real,
but unintentional. It's one of those things that if you
convince yourself is real, you will tend to interpret what
you are hearing in favor of that.
E.g. in Moriama Naotarō's "Kisetsu no mado de"
(季節の窓で), right in the first verse. [1] That…
actually a good example because there are so many covers of
that, you can see whether you hear the "whoopy wo" from
differnt speakers.
There is a similar situation in the pronunication o 千円.
There is a ghost "ye" that appears to the foreign ear. To the
point that we have developed the exonym "yen" for the
Japanese currency!!! The reality is more like that the /n/
is nasalized, similarly to what happens when it is followed
by /g/. [2] OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition
of the the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 8…
have all the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including
pitch accents:
ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方、砲ã�…
And, our cheeky word é ¬ gets a separate entry here due to
its pronunications ホー and ほほ。Both have a fa…
pitch after the leading ほ, like 方. No difference is
noted.
ホー with pitch rising at the "o": 法、報
So of course if you compare someone saying 法律 vs 頬,
there will be a difference. But a lot of longer ほお words
have the same rising pitch like 法. 法律 (ほう�…
vs 放り出す （ほおりだす％
Fairly intuitively, 頬張る（ほおばる…
pitch at the お、in spite of 頬 by itself exhibiting
falling pitch.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjvNqg3034
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg
timr wrote 12 hours 49 min ago:
> This is literally not a thing that exists outside of some
foreigners' imaginations.
I think you're a little obsessed with this. It's not pitch
accent and I'm not "being fooled", but if you want to
insist that you know better...fine? You do you!
> OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition of the
the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 832-83…
the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including pitch
accents: ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方々
²ã€éµ¬ã€æœ´
I've already given you examples where you can often hear
the difference if you try. These "ho-words" are completely
unrelated, and non-responsive. You seem to be arguing about
something else (or just trying to name-drop the NHK
pronunciation guide).
Anyway, there are two distinct sounds in the kana table for
う and お. They're individually pronounced differently,
so why you're so resistant to the idea that combinations of
the two might also have a difference in pronunciation, I
don't really know. I've personally had native teachers tell
me this, and I hear it all the time. Go ask a native to
slowly sound out the individual mora for a word like 紅茶
vs. say, 大阪 -- that's how I first heard it.
Anyway, I'm not really interested in debating this further.
It's a very, very minor point. Good luck with your study.
kazinator wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
> there are two distinct sounds in the kana table for う
and お.
Oh no, that totally escaped my feeble attention. Boy, do
I feel sheepishly stupid now.
> Go ask a native to slowly sound out the individual mora
In fact, now that you point it out, even if I do that
myself, it's obvious they are different: ko-u-cha,
o-o-sa-ka!
Well, I've just been going about this all wrong, barking
up the wrong tree.
In hindsight it now makes total sense that they wouldn't
just use う as a marker to indicate that the previous
お is long. Thats what ー is for; whereas う has a
sound!
Ohohsaka, coacha: gonna practice that.
jhanschoo wrote 1 day ago:
Do you have an academic source that describes this difference in
pronunciation in native speakers in normal usage?
Macha wrote 1 day ago:
What's interesting is that they address this problem where the latin
alphabet introduces the ambiguity (Is genin げんいん or
げにん? Hepburn goes with gen'in for the former to avoid
ambiguity), so they could have extended that to sake'iro and applied
the same strategy when the ambiguity comes from kana itself.
nemomarx wrote 1 day ago:
Use Ruby text alongside kanji, maybe?
sdovan1 wrote 1 day ago:
FWIW, it's HTML ruby tag, not the language.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Referenc...
rpearl wrote 1 day ago:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character
WalterBright wrote 1 day ago:
Please bring back Fraktur.
qingcharles wrote 1 day ago:
They need to do the same for a bunch of languages, e.g. Arabic.
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
Oh no.
This is going to make finding specific Japanese game roms even more
annoying.
quink wrote 1 day ago:
How? Near enough no one was using the Kunrei system for any of that.
If anything this will make it more consistent or at least no worse.
Macrons are the biggest inconsistency but that’s always been the
case.
It was either Hepburn, the English title (i.e. rock instead of
rokku), or just most sensibly kana/kanji that would have been used
for this everywhere, never other romanisation systems, to within a
rounding error.
naniwaduni wrote 1 day ago:
It was almost never quite Hepburn either, usually shi/chi/tsu/fu/ji
with no di/du, but often alongside wo/he/ha (in roughly that order
of likelihood, not always consistently), macrons almost never,
っち is cch. Ironically, I have to imagine there's more
"bastardized Nihonsiki" out there than "bastardized Kunreisiki",
because the differences between the two are exactly the ones that
matter when typing them out, and of course everyone in the j/e
scenes is by far most often inputting wa-puro ro-maji (and of
course that's ji, not zi, because which one is on the home row?).
In short, the usual infelicities of Japanese romanization as
practiced in the wild on keyboards people actually have, and there
is a method to the madness but it's not what any of the standards
reflect.
lbotos wrote 1 day ago:
Elaborate? I’m not following.
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
For people not familiar with Japanese, finding any info about a
Japanese-language game can be a pain. They may have a Japanese
representation, an official romanized name, a community romanized
name using a different system… plus may also go by an outright
English-language name, in some circles, which may (or may not)
overlap with the name of an English-language port (if it exists).
Then consider that some games have pretty extreme and confusing
name variants in various editions or on different platforms, and
those may go by different names in different contexts.
You can see the same game go by three different names on a
community forum, Wikipedia, and a catalogue of games + md5sums for
a system (you might think the md5sum could act as a Rosetta Stone
here… but less so than you’d think, especially in the specific
context of an English speaker and Japanese games, as you sometimes
need some specific, old, oddball and slightly-broken dump of a game
to get the one a particular English patch requires… and god knows
what name you’ll find that under, but probably not the same
md5sum as a clean dump)
The only bright spot in this is that if you can find a Japanese
game on Wikipedia the very first superscript-citation almost always
lists the official Japanese title in Japanese script on hover.
That’s a life saver. (Presumably all of this is easier if you
know at least some Japanese)
Though after I posted my comment I realized they mean they’re
switching to another existing system (which I think is already
widely used in gaming circles? Not sure though) which isn’t so
bad. At least it’s not another one being added to the mix.
fenomas wrote 1 day ago:
Nothing new is happening here - this is the government moving
towards formally recommending the system that's already most
widely used.
aidenn0 wrote 1 day ago:
Even with official names of media you can get stuck.
Consider 彼氏彼女の事情[1]. The Japanese na…
for the Manga and Anime, but the official names for the US
localization of each are different (the manga went with a
romanization of an abbreviation of the Japanese name Kare Kano
while the Anime went with a translation of the full name His and
Her Circumstances.
1:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kare_Kano
Macha wrote 1 day ago:
終末何してますか？忙しぅ
っていいですか？ has an "English" titl…
Japanese cover beside the Japanese one "Do you have what THE
END? Are you busy? Shall you save XXX?". I'm guessing the
author did it themselves. The capitalisation on THE END is
presumably supposed to reflect on 終末 (shuumatsu - the end
[often used for apocalypses etc]) punning on 週末 (shuumatsu
- weekend) and the XXX is because the Japanese title gets to
omit the subject and English can't.
Needless to say, the official English translations didn't keep
that title, going with "What are you doing at the end of the
world? Are you busy? Will you save us?"
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
Hepburn is poorly supported in some input methods, like on Windows. If
you want to type kōen or whatever, you really have to work for that
ō. It's better now on mobile devices and MacOS (what I'm using now): I
just long-pressed o and picked ō from a pop-up.
domenicd wrote 1 day ago:
It's terrible that Windows still has nothing good for this built-in.
I use [1] which is at least first-party. It's still got a few bugs,
but it's a big improvement.
(The bugs I've experienced: it doesn't properly disable itself during
video games, despite claiming to do so; sometimes the popup seem to
come up when I swear I didn't press the shortcut keys; rarely, the
popup gets stuck on screen and needs to be Alt+F4'ed.)
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/quick-ac...
johnea wrote 1 day ago:
Hepburn also allows the use of the double vowel, in this case: kooen
qingcharles wrote 1 day ago:
What's the best way to type Japanese on Windows? (I have a QWERTY
keyboard)
On mobile I just switch to the hiragana keyboard, but that obviously
isn't a sane option on desktop unless I'm clicking all the characters
with a mouse?
numpad0 wrote 1 day ago:
MS-IME or Google Japanese Input. (whatever)-Mozc on Linux. Use "IME
On" mode for Japanese, "IME Off" mode for alphanumeric text
inbetween.
"shio ha natoriumu[Space][Return][ImeOff](Na)[ImeOn] to
enso[Space][Return][ImeOff](Cl)[ImeOn] kara dekite imasu[Return]"
->
"しおはなとりうむ(Na)とえんã�…
™"
-> "塩はナトリウム(Na)と塩ç´
(Cl)からできています"
(NOTE: spaces added for legibility)
Most Japanese users use this "romaji" input - which is more vibe
heuristics based and not highly consistent with existing
romanizations hence the change. Some use "kana" with full 51
Hiragana symbols on JIS keyboard(with ろ/backslash/underscore key
to left of RShift, which makes it incompatible with ISO). I think
"most people don't do this anymore" remarks refer to the fact that
everyone's on the phone, and uses the "flick" input.
Tor3 wrote 1 day ago:
As others have said, people prefer different ways. My wife
(Japanese) writes on Windows (Japanese edition) in romaji, and
she's very fast. But she also says that in fact most Japanese (at
least of her generation) don't write that way (they presumably use
those small kana letters on Japanese-variant keyboards). As a
non-native I also write the way she does, though I'm on Linux. I'm
not sure why my wife writes using romaji, I should ask.. she wasn't
an English speaker or anything, so why that worked for her I don't
know.
throwaway2037 wrote 1 day ago:
This is a good question. I have seen a wide variety over the years
from native Japanese speakers. Some use the 1990s-style kana
keyboard. Some use romaji input where real-time software (called
an IME) automatically suggests conversion to the final Japanese
word (katakana/hiragana/kanji, etc.). On a mobile phone there is
usually an option to do 1990s feature phone style kana input, where
the 12 key input is shown, and you press one key as many times as
necessary to rotate to the correct kana that you wish to input.
You can see young girls with frighteningly long fingers nails
jamming away -- chatting with their friends via mobile text (Line,
SMS, etc.). Their "touch memory" (and sensitivity) must be
jaw-droppingly good -- like a professional drummer or something
similar.
Native Cantonese speakers in Hongkong have similarly diverse input
methods. I've even seen tiny digital draw pads at the public
library. It is pretty exciting (to me!) to watch an elderly person
furiously scribbling away on the pad, inputting traditional Chinese
charaters to search something on the Internet or in the media
catalog. I think it is very cool that public library makes a
strong effort to empower all types of users.
makeitdouble wrote 1 day ago:
When it comes to input "best" is highly subjective, but with that
said: Just adding Japanese support in the system language settings
is fine.
Standard Qwerty keyboards are well supported, you'll need to either
check the key shortcut to switch between inputs or do it with the
mouse if it's infrequent enough.
People using it daily will tweak a lot more, have a straight to IME
and straight out of IME key instead of the default switching
pattern, potentially add more tweaks to always have half-width
space and ponctuation whatever the mode they're in etc., but that's
a rabbit-hole you'll be free to fall into.
BTW the reverse works well enough: Windows has a specific mode to
force US ANSI on JIS layouts and still use the additional japanese
keys. Kinda fun they felt the need to leave that mode in.
junar wrote 1 day ago:
Using the example from the top-level comment, you would install an
IME, switch to hiragana mode, start typing "kouen" and convert to
kanji when you see the right suggestion.
It might sound complicated at first, but you can do it pretty fast
once you get used to it.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/input/japa...
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know now, but for the longest time, Google made a much
better Japanese IME for Windows than Microsoft ("Google Japanese
Input"). I started using it when running into reliability issues,
like disappearing kanji dictionary, or frozen switching between
roman and hiragana.
Assuming Microsoft's Japanese IME is still a dumpster fire, and the
Google one has not succumbed to Googleshitification, that would be
a way to go.
To enable the Microsoft IME there are some rituals to go through
like adding the Japanese language and then a Japanese keyboard
under that. It will download some materials, like fonts and
dictionaries. A reboot is typically not required, I think, unless
you make Japanese the primary language.
Once you have the keyboard, LeftShift + LeftAlt chord goes among
the input methods. Ctrl + CapsLock toggles hiragana/romaji input.
I think these are the same for Google or MS input.
bitwize wrote 1 day ago:
Compose o dash. Windows doesn't have an easy way to map in the
compose key (usually ralt)?
big if true, jesus christ microsoft
bryanlarsen wrote 1 day ago:
Note: bitwize is talking about how to do it on Linux. Which is the
best way in my biased opinion. Perhaps not the best mapping for
people who use it regularly but is awesome for those who use it
irregularly. We can usually guess how to do weird diacritics
without having to look it up.
Lammy wrote 1 day ago:
And when I can't think it up, I have a bookmark for my locale's
upstream compose sequences file: [1] and/or
[1]: https://github.com/X11Libre/mirror.fdo.libX11/blob/maste...
[2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libx11/-/blob/ma...
gpvos wrote 1 day ago:
Nope. When on Windows I tend to use one of the US International or
the Pseudo VT320 layout from [1] .
[1]: https://keyboards.jargon-file.org/
Lammy wrote 1 day ago:
[1] is like the first thing I install on any new Windows machine.
[1]: https://github.com/ell1010/wincompose
Etheryte wrote 1 day ago:
That's one aspect I really love about macOS. I'm from a small country
so nearly no one makes hardware with our exact layout, but with macOS
I can always just long press to fill in the gaps. I just wish all
apps used native inputs, not some weird half-baked solution they
built themselves.
Rendello wrote 1 day ago:
I rarely miss Linux, but I liked being able to have compose keys,
most of which were very logical and fast to type. Now on MacOS, I
either have to know the option (alt) combination or long press,
which makes my writing with accents way slower.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
vilasa wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
My favorite Linux layout was US International + AltGr dead keys.
Basically a US keyboard, but if you want an accented character,
just press the AltGr+Accent key, then the letter.
I got the same behavior on macOS by using
[1]: https://github.com/carjorvaz/macos-us-altgr-intl/blob/ma...
kps wrote 1 day ago:
If you frequently write the same characters, it's straightforward
to create your own keyboard layout that matches your usage, using
[1]: https://software.sil.org/ukelele/
lostlogin wrote 1 day ago:
> I just wish all apps used native inputs, not some weird
half-baked solution they built themselves.
I find this often with apps and websites, and I speak/write British
English (or attempt to).
Why effort is put into making a worse interface is baffling.
bschwindHN wrote 1 day ago:
Same with image viewers on the web. Google, twitter, imgur, and
others seem hell bent on making the shittiest possible zoom and
pan implementations to look at images.
adastra22 wrote 1 day ago:
Is that part of Hepburn? It is not mentioned in the article, nor by
most explainers that I’m familiar with.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Long_vo...
QuercusMax wrote 1 day ago:
The article says the new style says that you can use either a
macron or a doubled letter, but it's not clear if that's supported
for keyboard input on various platforms.
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
But in the case of ō, you can only use a doubled letter if the
underlying word is おお. If it is おう then you don't ha…
doubled letter you can use; you need "ou" and that's not Hepburn
any more. It is "wāpuro rōmaji" (word processor romaji).
shiomiru wrote 1 day ago:
"ou" is fine too, actually. See the proposal p. 14 (=16 in the
PDF): [1] (To differentiate between the case where it's
actually two vowels, you have
to put an apostrophe inbetween; their example is 小唄 ->
ko'uta.)
[1]: https://www.bunka.go.jp/seisaku/bunkashingikai/sokai/p...
ChrisArchitect wrote 2 days ago:
Previously in 2024 (?):
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972
dang wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
English-friendly Romanization system proposed for Japanese language -
[1] - Jan 2025 (23 comments)
Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70
years - [2] - March 2024 (97 comments)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42606969
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972
Theofrastus wrote 2 days ago:
I'm honestly surprised Hepburn wasn't the official standard yet. It
sounds way closer to the spoken sounds, at least to my western ears.
> The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し,
じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of
si, zi and tu.
I could imagine si, zi and tu sound closer to the spoken sounds to
Mandarin speakers.
fennecfoxy wrote 4 min ago:
I didn't really have a problem with the spoken sounds when learning
in school - we were also required to take Maori lessons as well and a
lot of the sounds are shared. Quite interesting really.
Edit: actually the only one I ever had an issue with was one of my
homestay's names "Ryouhei"...that Ryou sound...it's like the Y stops
me from rolling the R properly, so odd.
tkgally wrote 1 day ago:
One issue holding back the adoption of Hepburn has been that the
standard national curriculum (gakushū shidō yōryō) calls for all
children to be taught romaji beginning in the third grade (previously
fourth grade) of elementary school. It's taught in Kokugo (national
language, i.e., Japanese) classes and included in those textbooks, as
romaji characters are used in Japanese alongside kana and kanji as
well as, increasingly, in daily life (user names, passwords, etc.).
At that age, native speakers of Japanese can acquire kunreishiki more
easily, as the consonant representation corresponds more closely to
the Japanese phonology that they have internalized.
retrac wrote 1 day ago:
The old official system arguably makes more sense from a Japanese
perspective.
If you look at the kana, the Japanese syllabic writing system, they
have this ordering: ka ki ku ke ko, sa shi su se so, ta chi tsu te
to, etc. If you follow the regularity where there should be a "ti"
sound there is no "ti" sound and it happens to be pronounced "chi".
One common analysis holds that the underlying phonemes really are: ta
ti tu te to. Traditional Japanese grammarians usually analyzed it
this way. And they were historically pronounced that way: it has
arisen out of relatively recent sound change. Somewhat like how some
British speakers pronounce "Tuesday" such that it sounds much like
"Chews-day" to speakers of other dialects. Affrication in a fixed
context. The t phoneme triggers that kind of affrication
obligatorily in Japanese, before the i vowel or y glide.
Some disagree with this as overly theoretic and based excessively on
historical linguistics, and they insist that sh and f and ch are
distinct phonemes in Japanese. But the Japanese writing system
itself treats it as if they were not.
If you are learning Japanese it makes sense to pick a system that
reflects the internal logic of kana spelling. If you want to just
approximately pronounce Japanese words in English then you want
something that reflects the logic of English spelling.
These two goals are always in tension. Mandarin pinyin, for example,
was designed to reflect the logic of Mandarin phonology in a
consistent way. It's not meant to be easily pronounceable by English
speakers. It's to enable Mandarin speakers to look up words in a
dictionary or for students of the language to study Mandarin. Though
it has ended up used as a pronunciation guide for English speakers.
And that often doesn't go well; a lot of English speakers don't know
what to do with the q's and x's.
mcmoor wrote 10 hours 58 min ago:
This is the same reason why I'm disappointed that Pinyin won over
Wade-Giles. If Hepburn can be acknowledged to be better than
Kurei-Shiki, then Wade-Giles is also better than Pinyin. At the
very least we'll no longer have to deal with words containing q
that's pronounced nowhere near q. Although admittedly it does
produce some exotic looking words and boon for Scrabble players.
Macha wrote 1 day ago:
It's a change in purpose. Nihon-shiki was invented to teach
Japanese people the Latin alphabet, with a view to replacing
kana/kanji with the Latin alphabet. Therefore being understandable
to someone with a good idea of the kana layout was the priority.
Hepburn was designed to teach non-Japanese people Japanese,
therefore matching well to European (especially English) sounds was
considered more important.
Suggesting Japanese romanise is a fringe position these days, much
much more so than in the 1880s or the immediate aftermath of WW2,
and making that kind of change is much easier when you have a
population going from illiterate to literate than in a modern
society, so nobody's seriously considered Nihon-shiki (or its
slightly modernised descendent, Kunrei-shiki) a gateway to
romanising Japanese for the Japanese for a long time now.
So this is sort of an official recognition that the primary purpose
of romaji is for the benefit of foreigners.
z2 wrote 1 day ago:
For pinyin representation of Mandarin, these are very different
sounds, while the equivalent (identical) Mandarin pinyin
representation of し, じ, つ would be xi, ji, cu. I'm not as
familiar with romanization systems closer to Latin pronunciations,
but for Wade Giles it would probably be written like shi, chi, tsu.
nth233 wrote 1 day ago:
Not exactly. In the Wade–Giles system:
xi → hsi
ji → chi
ci → tz'u
shikon7 wrote 1 day ago:
You mean, if you would apply the inverse of the standard romanization
of Mandarin, the resulting sound would be closer to the Japanese
sound, if starting from the Kunrei spelling than if starting from the
Hepburn spelling?
usrnm wrote 1 day ago:
The popularity of Hepburn has a lot more to do with the English
language than the Japanese language
ranger_danger wrote 1 day ago:
> It sounds way closer to the spoken sounds, at least to my western
ears.
That's the thing... to some other non-English language speakers, the
existing/old romanization method actually is more accurate regarding
how the letters would be pronounced to them, especially coming from
languages that don't have the same e.g. [ch] or [ts] sounds as
written with Hepburn.
The one technical downside I would say to this change is, 1:1 machine
transliteration is no longer possible with Hepburn.
mytailorisrich wrote 2 days ago:
I don't know the details history of the system's development, however
I notice that with Kunrei everything spelling is neatly 2 characters
while with Hepburn it may be 2 or 3 characters:
Kunrei: ki si ti ni hi mi
Hepburn: ki shi chi ni hi mi
The politics of the issue is obviously that Hepburn is older and an
American system while Nihon and Kunrei are very purposely domestic
(Nihon "is much more regular than Hepburn romanization, and unlike
Hepburn's system, it makes no effort to make itself easier to
pronounce for English-speakers" [1]). Apparently, Hepburn was later
imposed by US occupying forces in 1945.
Perhaps 80 years is long enough and suitable to effect the change
officially with no loss of face.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki
jinushaun wrote 1 day ago:
Politics aside, Hepburn is better. You can’t seriously say you
prefer “konniti-ha” and “susi-wo tabemasu”
naniwaduni wrote 1 day ago:
You are very, very likely to find people who prefer "sushi wo
tabemasu", because standards are great.
JuniperMesos wrote 1 day ago:
"Better" depends on what you care about. _konniti-wa_ (which is
the Kunrei-siki romanization of こんにちは, _konniti…
Nihon-shiki form that preserves the irregular use of は as
topic-marking /wa/) and _susi-o_ (again, Kunrei-siki ignores a
native script orthographic irregularity and romanizes を as _o_
not _wo_ ) are more consistent with the native phonological
system of Japanese. In Japanese coronal consonants like /t/ and
/s/ are regularly palatalized to /tS/ and /S/ before the vowel
/i/, and there's no reason to treat _chi_ and _ti_ as
meaningfully different sequences of sounds. Linguists writing
about Japanese phonology use it instead of Hepburn for good
reason.
Obviously, being more transparent to English-readers is also a
reasonable goal a romanization system might have, and if that's
your goal the Hepburn is a better system. I don't have a strong
opinion about which system the Japanese government should treat
as official, and realistically neither one is going to go away.
But it's simply not the case that Hepburn is a better
romanization scheme for every purpose.
shiroiuma wrote 1 day ago:
I don't see how kunrei-shiki is useful at all. If I want to
write Japanese words so non-Japanese speakers can pronounce
them approximately, then Hepburn is the way to go. If I want
to write Japanese words so Japanese speakers can read them
best, I'll write them in actual Japanese. This isn't 1975, and
computers are perfectly able to render hiragana, katakana, and
kanji. What do I need kunrei-shiki for? I've been living in
Japan for years now, and have never found a use for it.
decimalenough wrote 1 day ago:
It originates from a Meiji-era society that quite seriously
proposed ditching kanji/kana entirely in favor of romanized
Japanese.
This actually happened in Vietnam, and Korea comes close
although they use the Hangul script, not the Latin alphabet.
xigoi wrote 1 day ago:
Should we also change other languages’ orthographies to make
them easier to pronounce for English speakers? “Bonzhoor”
instead of “Bonjour”?
soraminazuki wrote 1 day ago:
Do you think Japanese people actually read and write in
kunrei-shiki? No, they write using their own letters.
Romanization is an approximation that exists primarily for two
purposes: 1. to express Japanese terms in other languages and
2. to enable typing Japanese on a computer. It’s silly to
enforce kunrei-shiki, a system rarely used in practice, in the
name of "accuracy" based on arbitrary criteria. Romanized
spellings will never be accurate for obvious reasons.
Given the purpose of romanization, it’s more practical to
choose a system that allows non-Japanese speakers to pronounce
words more closely aligned with the correct pronunciation.
xigoi wrote 1 day ago:
What I’m complaining about is that the romanization is
based specifically on English, arbitrarily chosen from all
languages that natively use the Latin alphabet. For example,
what’s transcribed as “shi” is only “aligned wit…
correct pronunciation” for English speakers. In other
languages it would be more accurately transcribed as
“ši”, “szi“, “chi”, “schiâ€�…
stickfigure wrote 1 day ago:
> “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”
English is already heavily Norman-ized. Half of our vocabulary
- including the word pronounce - comes from French.
lostlogin wrote 1 day ago:
We could start by standardising English, so that pronunciation
was always the same for a given letter order.
devnullbrain wrote 1 day ago:
>English
Use *h₂enǵʰ-ish please.
ronsor wrote 1 day ago:
Japanese people don't read romanized Japanese. Even Japanese
learners don't read romanized Japanese.
Romanization is, by and large, a thing that exists for people
who already know European/Western languages.
xigoi wrote 1 day ago:
What I’m complaining arout is that it seems to only be
designed for English speakers, not for European language
speakers.
SpecialistK wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
Others in the thread have suggested that Hepburn works
quite well for German and other European languages ( [1] )
But it's a reality that English is the primary (if not
sole) focus, for historical reasons and as the global
lingua franca. English is taught (poorly, from what I hear)
in schools, played on train announcements, is the only
Western language available on ticket machines, and is the
assumed language of non-Asian visitors to the country. I
was even on a couple of domestic flights a few days ago and
the captain / FAs made announcements in English. It is not
"arbitrary" at all.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286292#4628...
rdtsc wrote 1 day ago:
> Should we also change other languages’ orthographies to
make them easier to pronounce for English speakers?
“Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”?
Already done.
- Komen ça va?
- Mo byin, mærsi.
We don't have anything against [1] , do we?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole
wewtyflakes wrote 1 day ago:
English is the top language spoken in all the world; it would
be lovely to facilitate better communication with that
population.
QuercusMax wrote 1 day ago:
And the way English generally uses the Roman alphabet
(obviously excluding the zillions of irregularities) isn't
that far off from how most European languages use the Roman
alphabet.
I'd expect that Spanish, German and French speakers would
benefit just as much as English speakers from these changes.
dragonwriter wrote 1 day ago:
> And the way English generally uses the Roman alphabet
(obviously excluding the zillions of irregularities) isn't
that far off from how most European languages use the Roman
alphabet.
Its not far off from the union of how all other European
languages use the Roman alphabet, would be closer to
accurate.
QuercusMax wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, but the point is this isn't really making romanized
Japanese more English-like. It's making it more similar
to how just about every other language already uses the
Roman alphabet. This isn't an Anglo-centric thing, it's
just good common sense - unless your goal is to make it
harder to pronounce your language properly, which seems
like an obvious own-goal.
dragonwriter wrote 1 day ago:
> It's making it more similar to how just about every
other language already uses the Roman alphabet.
There is no way "every other language already uses the
Roman alphabet."
Many languages are internally consistent in how they
use it, but those that are aren't consistent with each
other. And then there is English, which does pretty
much everything any other language which uses the Roman
alphabet does somewhere, and probably a few that none
of the other extant languages normally using that
alphabet do with it, on top.
AndriyKunitsyn wrote 1 day ago:
About 30% of people worldwide use a language that's not
written in Roman alphabet.
Additionally, being written in Roman alphabet doesn't
neccessarily mean it's clear how to pronounce it.
Hungarians calls their country "Magyarország", but
unless you know Hungarian, you will be surprised with
how it's pronounced. Same as "Chenonceaux", "Tekirdağ"
or "Crkvina".
tmtvl wrote 1 day ago:
Worcestershire.
QuercusMax wrote 1 day ago:
We're not talking about words like worcestershire.
I'm talking about words like "bat" "monkey"
"chimichanga". Those that follow the rules. There
can't possibly be irregular spellings using the
romanizations we're talking about!
QuercusMax wrote 1 day ago:
Those are especially pathological cases, and not
especially relevant to this discussion, as the
romanization rules are explicitly designed to be
consistent.
AndriyKunitsyn wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
Okay, I misread the context of the discussion. I
apologize.
QuercusMax wrote 1 day ago:
If French didn't use the Roman alphabet natively, you might
have a point.
At some point you might as well use Roman characters the way
the Cherokee alphabet does - which is to say, uses some of the
shapes without paying attention to what sounds they made in
English.
Theofrastus wrote 2 days ago:
The political aspect might be a big part of why and how the systems
are chosen. Didn't know about that!
wyan wrote 2 days ago:
Not closer to the spoken sounds, closer to English orthography.
mono442 wrote 2 days ago:
It works better with other European languages' orthography too.
Theofrastus wrote 2 days ago:
Native German speaker here. It fits very well here, too
rfarley04 wrote 2 days ago:
I live in Thailand and I cannot get over the fact that romanization is
(seemingly?) completely unstandardized. Even government signage uses
different English spelling of Thai words.
yongjik wrote 1 day ago:
Korea is stuck in a funny middle ground, where names like cities or
railway stations all follow the standard without exception, while
personal or corporate names are in a state of total chaos. So the
cell phone maker is Samsung, but the subway station in Seoul is
Samseong, even though they're written and pronounced in the same way
in Korean. (No, they aren't related.)
It's unfortunate but I don't think it'll get fixed any time soon.
Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No. (The most common
romanization for these family names would be: Lee, Oh, Woo, Ahn, and
Roh.)
deaux wrote 1 day ago:
You've nerd sniped me!
No country is going to force their big multinationals to change
their international name they chose back in the 50s and are now
known as world-wide. Personal names aren't too chaotic either, as
the choice presented when choosing a romanization is limited,
people can't just make stuff up on the ground. They're off, but
generally in the same ways.
> Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No.
An is pretty common - given the massive reach of KPop among global
youth, I wouldn't be surprised if the most well-known 안씨 as of
2025 was an "An" (a member of the group 아이브). Roh has fall…
out of favor, young 노s generally go with Noh, the Rohs are
usually older people. I too do long for the day where an 이 or 우
just goes with I or U, or if they must, at least Ih or Uh :)
IMO you left out the worst offender, Park. At least with 이 or 우
I can see why people would be hesitant to go the proper route, as
most of the world is unfamiliar with single-phoneme names, but 박s
have no excuse.
With 이, there's a pretty good alternative as well, and what's
more - it's actually already in use when talking about the greatest
Korean in history, Yi Sun-Shin! So much better than "Lee".
jerriep wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, my full names are Jeremia Josiah, and on my work permit they
wrote the Thai version as เจอเรเมีà…
โยชิอา. I cannot figure out why they chose to …
the J in Jeremia but ย for the J in Josiah. Both are pronounced the
same and I would consider จ the correct choice. I would consider
ย more correct for representing a word with Y.
rfarley04 wrote 1 day ago:
That's hilarious. The one I always notice is ก getting romanized
as a K, ie Kanchanaburi or กานต์ becoming Karn.
ilamont wrote 1 day ago:
You should have seen Taiwan in the 1990s. It was a hot mess of older
Western romanization systems, historical and dialectical exceptions,
competing Taiwanese and pro-China sensibilities, a widely used
international standard (pinyin), and lots of confusion in official
and private circles about the proper way to write names and locations
using the Latin alphabet. In 1998, the City of Taipei even made up
its own Romanization system for street names at the behest of its
then-new mayor, a supporter of Taiwan independence ( [1] ).
The chart halfway down this blog post lays out some of the challenges
once the hanyu pinyin standard was instituted in 2009: [2] The author
concludes with this observation:
So that’s why people in Taiwan can’t spell anything consistently
and why all the English-language newspapers spell the same things
differently. As for me, I’m giving up on trying to remember how
everyone spells their name. I know lots of people, especially Taiwan
nationalists, dislike having the PRC hanyu pinyin system. I dislike
imposing it upon them. However, in only three weeks, I’ve found
myself spelling the same thing in multiple ways and wasting time
looking up how I did it last time. Since almost no one reads my blog
anyway, I’ll do it the way that’s most convenient for me.
I’ll also always provide the Chinese characters so that people who
can read them know who I’m talking about.
[1]: https://pinyin.info/news/2019/article-on-early-tongyong-piny...
[2]: https://frozengarlic.wordpress.com/on-romanization/
Stevvo wrote 1 day ago:
Thailand, famously, was never colonized by European powers.
Everywhere else, some colonial administrator standardized a system of
romanization.
graemep wrote 1 day ago:
Sri Lanka was a colony and Sinhala does not have a standard as far
as I know. If there is one no one pays any attention to it.
petesergeant wrote 1 day ago:
Oh there are plenty of standards, including an official one. The
problem is nobody uses them. Thai writing is weird, and between the
tones and the character classes and silent letters might as well
just make some shit up. My birth certificate, drivers license, and
work permit all had different spellings of my name on them.
IIRC, the road signs for “Henri Dunant Road” were spelled
differently on either end, which was ironic, because at least that
did have a canonical Latin form.
floren wrote 1 day ago:
Japan was not colonized, although it was briefly occupied.
kazinator wrote 1 day ago:
In the first place, "romanization" of English is unstandardized! Or
was that unstandardised?
adastra22 wrote 1 day ago:
It tends to be standardized within a single country.
jagged-chisel wrote 1 day ago:
And standardised within an empire.
aidenn0 wrote 1 day ago:
Is it hiccough or hiccup in the US?
merelysounds wrote 1 day ago:
Standardizations can be notoriously inconsistent[1],
disregarded[2] or evolve fast[3].
There’s a surprising amount of interesting articles on
wikipedia about that.
[1] [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)#Spellin...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensational_spelling
qingcharles wrote 1 day ago:
Whoosh :)
adastra22 wrote 1 day ago:
No I understood. I just failed to see the relevance.
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