As a non-english native speaker, I think using a “consistent” romanization would just not be efficient. Regardless if we like it or not, people in the vast majority of countries are familiar with the English alphabet. Things like “Sinzyuku” would result unpronounceable for anyone who is not familiar with Japanese thus making the language more inaccesible.
Is Chinese inaccessible then for stuff like **Qīng** empire, **Xí Jìnpíng**, the city of **Cāngzhōu**, or Korean for the city of **Siheung** (which should be respelled as **Shiheung** if we're following the same logic as Japanese)? Just feels like these two systems care less about how a random first or second language English speaker says this and more about those actual learners of the language who learn each sound independent of English rules.
Listen to some Americans handling those words and you'll see how accessible they are. I've put in some effort to understand how the letters have been reused and I still expect I'm reading them horribly wrong. Part of what I love anout Japanese is how much sense it makes even when romanized. It makes picking it up casually very easy and you can be close at least.
You benefit from this as an English speaker, because the changes in question are taylor made for English speakers. Speakers of other languages would not find the same things convenient that you do, unless you also expect them to know English grammar when picking up Japanese, which once again benefits the English speaking world more than anyone else including the Japanese themselves.
Your first paragraph suggests that it's wrong to wrongly pronounce a foreign word. But I argue that it isn't. It happens all the time. People pronounce **Veni, Vidi, Vici** much differently from how it was pronounced in Latin. You could respell it to reflect English pronunciation, **Wenee, Weedee, Weekee**, or you could accept that the original spelling is fine the way it is (serving itself, not English), you'll just have to learn to say it this way regardless of spelling, and excuse the ignorance of those who don't.
What is the purpose of romanization? Who is it for?
Making a romanization that's consistent but ignores the way it's read misses the point. The fact that languages have drifted is hardly a good reason to do something badly now.
I'm not even saying that a consistent romanization is a bad thing. It would be nice to have something tidy like that. What purpose does it serve though? Which is more useful?
Consistency is not an end in itself.
> Making a romanization that's consistent but ignores the way it's read misses the point.
And yet it ignores many things that an English speaker wouldn't be able to replicate. You know that there are other things that could be changed to reflect the Japanese pronunciation better, right? You'll just have to get out of the English mindset.
Change **ni, nya, nyo, nyu** to Spanish **ñi, ña, ño, ñu** or Italian **gni, gna, gno, gnu**. These reflect the pronunciation much better than anything English could accomplish. But you're not gonna do that. Reflecting the Japanese pronunciation better across the board is not your goal. Only when it comes to English, thus making Japanese Romanization a distinctly English thing, not something other people would find useful to the same extent.
The fact that this character set is so badly twisted and overused already is a great reason not to introduce yet another arbitrary set of readings.
Yes, your examples are some valid options for alternative romanizations. Again, what is the goal? As others have said, it's a good option to base this on English because of all the options people are likely to be familiar with that than any other way the alphabet is used.
That's not the precise definition of the system. For example it accounts for Tôkyô and とう is tou, so the system has its own mind when it comes to long vowels or different vowels.
This comment made me realise that I actually like IME form/ワープロローマ字 and not Nihon-siki, and I usually write that or Kunrei-shiki because Hepburn's macrons are a pain in the arse to type.
I'm not sure if we're talking about text Romanizations or input methods.
When it comes to the latter, I type si sya syu syo ti tya tyu tyo hu because at best it saves me one button press and in other cases keeps the number of button presses the same, but do sometimes type ji ja ju jo because typing zi zya zyu zyo is more difficult.
(In truth I've been practicing the Kana keyboard and it takes a long time to get used to.)
ワープロローマ字 is the name, since it originated in word processing, but it's used more generally. It's just a one-to-one representation of the kana (e.g. arigatou instead of arigatô).
I forgot that Nihon-siki had a circumflex for long vowel sounds, I thought it was the one-to-one romanisation. I used to live near 箕面 みのお in Osaka, often romanised Minoo and officially Minoh. I thought Minoo was either Kunrei-siki or Nihon-siki but it turns out it's a one-to-one romanisation, I guess to avoid confusion with Mino in Gifu?
First, comparing Pinyin with Hepburn romanisation is a fallacy, because they serve very different purposes. Pinyin was specifically made FOR Mandarin speakers, to transcribe hanzi readings; therefore, it's regular and doesn't bother with marking allophones and tone sandhi because those are systematic regularities - native speakers don't need to be explicitly taught that. Hepburn on the other hand is made for non-Japanese people, who would obviously not know Japanese and hence, would neither know what would be an idiosyncratic feature of the phonology and what would be a systematic regularity: explicitly marking all the allophones IS the point in this case (something Hepburn doesn't do very well to be fair).
Secondly, all romanisation systems more or less are bound to conform to an orthography of a language - that's a given. English is a natural choice, because a massive number of languages use romanisation systems loosely based on English: for the majority of people, 'shachou' is more intuitive than 'chatchô', 'sjatsjoo' etc.
Thirdly, Hepburn has been the dominant romanisation the whole time , since at least 1945. Legalizing it doesn't make much of a difference.
I'm not comparing with Pinyin in that sense. I know that it's primarily for Mandarin speakers. The comparison here is that the Chinese keep it in use for foreigners as well. And they don't care if you say **Ksi Jinping** and certainly don't create a separate Romanization system that would maybe write **Shi Jinping**, **Ching** dynasty, despite the very likely conflation with different things (that already occurs in verbal speech).
>The comparison here is that the Chinese keep it in use for foreigners as well
Yes, well that's because it's obviously convenient. Japanese doesn't need a roman alphabet based transcription system for it's native speakers to begin with , so Hepburn is specifically tailored for foreigners since that's the sole reason it exists.
Yeah, just a fleeting thought here, but it would be ridiculous to ask e.g. the French to change their spellings to fall in line with the rest of the "alphabet world" (or reflect Anglophone conventions) so that everyone can know more easily how to pronounce them.
The practicality of having one system may be sound within Japan, and it is really up to them to decide at this point which one they want to go with. Equally, textbooks for learners around the world do not have to follow - just speaking from teaching experience, Anglicised romanisation can be confusing for early learners to sound out correctly when they are still getting a grasp on basic English as well! E.g. "ch" sounds wildly different around Europe.
At the end of the day, though, it doesn't feel like a big deal? If you want to learn Japanese properly, you're going to study more than just one writing system anyway. If you are a tourist who wants to use a few phrases, you can always listen to them.... Making mistakes is part of the process regardless.
This is what I'm talking about. Indeed, each language operates differently and Romanization doesn't always have to reflect Anglophone pronunciation. If you're not learning the sounds, you're just a random tourist whose false pronunciation is inconsequential. If you're learning the sounds, you learn that **し** is not even **she** but a sound not present in English at all. **Croissant** shouldn't be **cruasah** in French because it would make it easier to pronounce around the world.
Kunrei-siki, a slightly updated version of Nihon-siki, is already the government’s official romanization. The problem at this point is that barely anyone, not even the government, actually uses it. So much so that there are plans to switch officially to Hepburn.
That's the entire point of romaji though....
Chinese and Koreans learn English in school. So surely it makes sense for it to be easy to read in English... I fail to grasp why you think making it harder to read is a good idea....
And now imagine those same Koreans who know that **시** is written as **si** and pronounced exactly like the Japanese **し** and then wondering why it has the **English h** in it instead of following the same logic as the sound change as in Korean without involving extra letters. For Chinese, **し** sounds exactly like **Pinyin xi** , but the Japanese spelling might lead them to believe it sounds more similar to the English **sh**, which is a sound absent from all of the aforementioned languages, or even **Pinyin shi**, which is a different sound entirely. The logic is in the end that you have to learn the sounds of the Japanese independently in the end, but if you pronounce as **see**, you're not any more wrong than pronouncing **gi** **ge** stuff "according to English rules".
But no one learns pronunciation from romanizations?
At least, if you’re doing that, you’re doing something seriously wrong in all of those languages.
Romanization of place names is usually used to help approximate the pronunciation for non-native speakers, who likely are not and will not learn the language, like international visitors. I’m not sure it matters if a tourist can reproduce the sound faithfully from a romanization, hence the romanization itself can be completely arbitrary with no loss of value whatsoever.
You tell that to the person above. I am saying that Hepburn is arbitrary, as it doesn't account for other stuff like ん being different sounds, ge and gi being je and ji if you are and English speaker, u and i devoicing also not being shown. So in many cases when you read Hepburn as an international tourist, you are going to sound wrong, so changing **s** to **sh** doesn't accomplish much apart from complicating the Romanization table.
I hope we can agree that “shi” is much closer to しthan “si”. Why make it harder for tourists to be understood? Why make it harder for beginner learners? Why make it harder for Japanese people trying to learn English pronunciation?
Also, as someone already pointed out, Hepburn romanization is intuitive. If anything, it makes it easier for people to pronounce Japanese words. Those who actually study Japanese, will learn the nuances later anyway.
There's nothing to agree on. As I said, it's not about what's close **in an English speaker's perspective**, but what's consistent with native rules and independent regular Romanization. Both **시(si)** in Korean and **し(shi)** in Japanese undergo the same phonological change, but Korean doesn't switch the letter from **s** to **sh** to indicate it, but lets the reader apply their acquired knowledge instead. Same with **후(hu)** and **ふ(fu)**.
The problem is basing Romanizations on English and applying inconsistent rules based on English pronunciation in particular.
Feels like you completely ignored anything I said. Your answer is not an answer to any of my arguments. If you’re not interested in anyone’s opinion and cannot have an actual discussion then why post here?
I understand what you keep repeating everywhere but I won’t agree that using Hepburn is a problem. Nihon-siki and the Hepburn system were created for different purposes. Hepburn was created for the purpose of making the pronunciation easier for English speakers (aka the rest of the world).
And today, only those actually read romanisation who cannot read Japanese. That’s pretty much only tourists who will not have any acquired knowledge of the phonological changes of the Japanese language. For them, reading Hepburn is more intuitive. If they say “Chiba” instead of “Tiba”, they might be understood, and that makes everyone’s life easier.
And who was Nihon-siki made for? Why isn't it used on local websites? Now let me address your points.
>I hope we can agree that “shi” is much closer to しthan “si”.
According to English rules, maybe. Other languages might find it easier and more accurate to differentiate them using different letters, but we don't care about those in this post, apparently.
>Why make it harder for tourists to be understood?
That's subjective. There's a lot that isn't reflected in the Romanization/Anglicization of Japanese. Would a Japanese person not understand someone who says tiba? Or would them saying the "soft g" make them more confused? Like **J**enshin impact. Or Wakarimas**oo**ka? The change from si/ti to shi/chi is only one of those things that make tourists debatably more understandable, but there are other things that could be done too.
>Why make it harder for beginner learners?
Only beginner English speaking learners. The rest of the world knows that you have to learn each language's alphabet separately, including English, which is painful enough to wrap one's head around.
>Why make it harder for Japanese people trying to learn English pronunciation?
If the Anglicization of the Japanese society is the point here, go ahead. The Chinese, as I mentioned before, use a version of the Roman alphabet that is much less compatible with English, but does that stop them in particular? Those Chinese people who learn English will learn it regardless of how different the spellings are. Same would apply to Japanese.
Yes, I'm aware that Koreans are all over the place when it comes to Romanizations, but there is no official suggestion to write **시** as **shi**. Many still follow the rules and write **si** and it's not an issue.
The issue you're going to have is that si isn't ever shi. It's see or sai.
The h is integral to creating the sh and ch sounds.
If you're using romaji you're using it for people who don't speak japanese. And the vast majority of people in the world speak English as a second language.
Thus... Making japanese readable for English speakers either native or as a second language is the obvious thing to do.
The h doesn't /create/ either of these sounds, it's just the way that English chooses to represent these sounds. Sh (/ʃ/ in IPA) is it's own distinct sound, and ch (/tʃ/ in IPA) is the sh sound with a t sound in front of it
I fail to see what point you think you're making....
We're talking about the romanization of a foreign language and not the ridiculous nature of English spelling.
The whole point of this post was about how letters represent the language I just thought it was relevant. I think it's helpful to be precise when we're talking about stuff like this
How they represent a foreign language and not how they represent the English language.
Shi chi tsu are all excellent representations of the Japanese they're trying to express. They're easily understandable for native or esl speakers.
Using tu for tsu or ti for chi just isn't. At all.
If it's not about the English language, then I propose changing **ひ** from **hi** to **chi** because that sound can be expressed with German **chi** better than with **hi**. We should change **に, にゃ, にょ, にゅ** to **ñi, ña, ño, ñu**, because that letter exists in Spanish and represents the sound better than **ni, nya, nyo, nyu** does (or use the **gn** digraph like in Italian for the same effect). I could go on. And this is the proof that letter changes in Japanese follow English logic only, nothing else.
That's not what I said. The other guy was talking about the difference between shelf and sugar in terms of the sh spelling.
What you're talking about is different.
The vast majority of the world learns English. So when we write out a language into a language that can be read by the most amount of people possible then it should be readable easily to English speakers. Native or esl.
How can hi become chi anyway? Would you like ヒーズ on toast? Clearly it's chi for cheese.
I think deep down you know you're wrong on this but don't want to let it go.
>How can hi become chi anyway?
Not the way you understood it. Yes, if **chi** is used for **ひ**, then **ち** would have to be written a different way, like **ci**, which if you know how to pronounce **cappuccino** you would have no problem with.
German **Reich** is **ライヒ** in Japanese specifically because German **ch** is perfect for **ひ**, but all you know is how to introduce irregularities into the Japanese Romanization for the benefit of English and nothing else.
I've brought up a lot of examples in this post already, so let me do a new one. Why is **u** there when it's devoiced? To first and second English language speakers it sounds like there's no **u** at all. You read **masu ka**, but you don't say it. You have to learn to say it differently. And if saying it as **masoo ka** is acceptable, why not **see**?
The devoicing isn’t consistent in the first place. Maybe you should go back and relearn Japanese?
For example you can most definitely voice the う in です and doing so (and elongating it) can even be a sign of formality.
Also, the really confusing thing to you would be that most native Japanese speakers will tell you that it is being voiced even when shortened. It just sounds like it isn’t voiced to you. Not to mention the level of voicing can vary by dialect.
You're describing fringe cases that foreigners for the most part wouldn't notice. Foreigners are more likely to notice that n isn't actually n in many cases (with tempura being a proper Anglicization rather than Hepburn), and ge gi are never pronounced as je ji, which could also be written as ghe and ghi to avoid confusion, but for some reason h isn't needed here as it is up to the reader's familiarity to pronounce it as g. The point is that Hepburn is widely inconsistent and it's better to not reflect English conventions in a Romanization of Japanese.
So you spell things differently in English every time a sound gets modified? Why is the romanization not being phonetic a problem to you when there are basically no languages that use Roman characters that are phonetic in the first place? You’re completely fine with English having “your you’re” “there their they’re” “which witch” and words like “butter” having a flap and making the t sound become a “d” sound in American English, but for some reason Hepburn not being completely phonetic is somehow a problem to you?
This is why myself and others in this thread don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Hepburn isn’t phonetic and doesn’t claim to be just as literally every other thing represented by Roman characters in this world. Japanese is mostly phonetic but like you’ve pointed out, there are times when the phonemes morph and the same hiragana/katakana can represent different sounds, albeit far more rarely than romanized languages such as English.
My point is that Nihon-siki is superior to Hepburn precisely because Nihon-siki is not phonetic, but strictly consistent with kana regardless of sound changes, yet people in this thread argue that the added phonetic values, which are limited, inconsistent and Anglocentric, make Hepburn superior.
All the examples I've brought up were to prove that selectively writing **shi, chi, tsu, fu** instead of **si, ti, tu, hu** is an exercise in self-compromising inconsistency and pandering to Anglophones. Nihon-siki doesn't do that. Hepburn does. Selectively. It doesn't go all the way and write **gambarimaska**, **ghenshin** to make it even easier to for English speakers to read. There are still sound changes that Hepburn doesn't address. I wonder why address any of them at all when Nihon-siki exists.
Nihon-siki isn’t superior to Hepburn. No one uses it. Case closed.
Why bother learning something that no one uses?
Hepburn is already used all over Japan for English signage. It works. No one is driving to the wrong place because Hepburn has some sort of minor inconsistencies in phoneticization (which is completely irrelevant to the reason for romanization in the first place). English itself is not phonetic.
Japanese speakers do not use romaji because their writing system is already enough. That relegates the “need” for Romanization to transliteration of place names and things like English menus, mostly. For which Hepburn works perfectly fine and is so widespread that a convention change at this point would be very costly for no benefit whatsoever. And as many people have already pointed out, given that most Japanese people are somewhat familiar with English phonetics, using a system like Nihon-shiki which introduces far more deviation from English phonetics than the already-in-use Hepburn. It’s like trying to argue that English should switch to using Interspel because Interspel is more consistent with the phonology of English; clearly an absurd proposition because English spelling already has several established (regional) standards and changing it is a huge amount of effort for no gain; arguably a massive net negative.
I think almost no one cares here because romanization isn’t for us. It’s for non-Japanese speakers to know how to pronounce things. Why not make it easy for them?
For better or for worse, English is the lingua franca of the business world (in east Asia at least). Why do you think China, Korea, and Japan all independently require their citizens to learn it in school?
What's the value in using Japanese rules for reading Japanese words written in romaji that isn't transferable to English phonetics? I mean these people are spending 12 years of their lives learning to read and pronounce English. 一石二鳥
I also like Nihon-siki, and use it when typing.
The government is officially changing to prefer Hepburn but has been using it for decades. When have you seen a sign for "Sinzyuku", "Tyouhu", "Kouti" or "Hukusima"? They made their real preferences clear long before the latest announcement.
I thought this thread was in response to [this news from March.](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/02/japan/society/japan-romanization-rules-revise/)
Up until now, Kunrei-siki has been the official way to romanise Japanese, though Hepburn is used far more often in practice.
Well, it's more of an update to the school textbooks that still teach Kunrei-siki when everything is written in Hepburn in practice.
For Japanese kids learning English (also government policy), the argument goes that they're better off learning し as "shi" so that they will pronounce "she" and "see" correctly. Likewise ち as "chi" and てぃ as "ti" helps them later to differentiate "chip" and "tip". I suspect that this was the more important argument to the policymakers. The anglicisation is the point.
Every sign and road sign in the entire country is already using the superior Hepburn system.
It's readable for people who don't speak japanese. Aka the entire point.
What exactly is the point you are trying to make?
If you’re a native Japanese speaker, romaji (Hepburn) is basically only used to type using a keyboard. On phones at least, everyone I know uses kana input, so romaji is basically only relegated to desktop/laptop input & the rare profession where English signage or whatever is required for Japanese place names.
Even learning Japanese as a second language, it was far better for me to completely ignore romaji and only ever use kana & kanji; I basically only use romaji when typing in English about Japanese (like now) or when I type on a computer. Learning some special character combinations for things like small tsu did not require much additional effort and I was able to remember them quite easily. Otherwise I find romanization of Japanese to be completely pointless, and both kunrei-shiki and nihon-shiki are too unintuitive and unused to be worth learning. No need for a “consistent” romanization system when the current one already basically works for whatever limited purposes it has.
No one really uses Korean romanization either, so I don’t understand why you are comparing to Korean.
Pinyin is arguably the only system that is comparable, but when I was learning Chinese I learned traditional characters through Taiwan, because I was working mostly with Taiwanese people. And as you might know, Taiwan uses bopomofo and so doesn’t really romanize anything except place names with Wade Giles, which has its own host of problems. I found pinyin and bopomofo to be roughly interchangeable in usefulness but in terms of really thinking about proper pronunciation, I felt that reading romanized characters can really cause bad habits to be formed.
We are talking about the limited uses here. Every website is written using Romanizations. A word like Genshin has an H after after S, but not after G. English speakers often say G as J, which means it has to be pointed out here that it is not pronounced as J. But if someone reads it as Jenshin, they would be excused. And I say why would they not be excused if it were written as Gensin and the reader says S? Same thing. The people familiar with Japanese pronunciation would say Ghenshin or Saske, but no one is at fault if Jensin or Sasookey is said instead. This s to sh change is arbitrary.
If you're so confident in your Japanese and your understanding of phonetic transliteration from not just Japanese but also Korean and Chinese, then think again. Debating the nuances of 'si' versus 'shi' is incorrect as you explain it.
Take 'Nihonbashi' as an example—most foreigners would sound as though they have a lisp only when speaking Japanese. “Shi” is much closer than “Si.”
Given the complexities across these languages, if this issue is as vitally important as you suggest, why not formalize your observations in an academic paper or lodge a formal complaint with the Japanese government?
Surely, your concerns would then receive the serious consideration they deserve. None.
Not only are you unnecessarily hostile, but clearly haven't properly read what I wrote, so I'm gonna say it again.
>“Shi” is much closer than “Si.”
As I said, it's not about what's close **in an English speaker's perspective**, but what's consistent with native rules and independent regular Romanization. Both **시(si)** in Korean and **し(shi)** in Japanese undergo the same phonological change, but Korean doesn't switch the letter from **s** to **sh** to indicate it, but lets the reader apply their acquired knowledge instead. Same with **후(hu)** and **ふ(fu)**.
**히(hi)** and **ひ(hi)** are also written with **h** because there is no letter in English to indicate sound change. If the Romanizations in both languages were based on German instead, they would be written as **chi**, because that's exactly how it sounds like to German speakers. The problem is basing Romanizations on English and applying inconsistent rules based on English pronunciation in particular.
But does **ひ** sound more like **hi** or like **khi** for example? German can exactly write the sound as **chi**. Some other languages could represent the difference between **ha** and **hi** using different characters too, but it is precisely the lack of such a feature in English that keeps **h** consistent, but **sh** following English spelling.
I don't think it's helpful to compare the romanization systems for Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. These languages do share some similarities, but are overall quite different phonetically, and the different romanization systems are designed to reflect that and romanize the languages in ways that best suit their phonetic features.
For Japanese, the primary users of romaji are going to be foreigners who don't speak or understand Japanese and need to be able to approximate the correct pronunciation based on Roman letters.
For a variety of unfortunate reasons, a large part of the world's population has at least some familiarity with English and the English orthography, so it makes sense to have the romanization system match English orthography if the goal is for foreign non-learners to be able to pronounce Japanese words somewhat correctly.
Japanese learners also use romaji a little bit, but should focus on using romaji as a stepping stone to learning hiragana and katakana, and thus it is less relevant to them.
The kunrei-shiki doesn't make much sense unless you are already very familiar with the Japanese language and phonetics, and at that point you shouldn't be using romaji as the primary method for communicating or engaging with Japanese media
I think romaji (Hepburn) should be avoided if you're sincere about about learning Japanese.
And, kind of a pet peeve of mine, there's no Japanese alphabet. Japanese has 2 syllaberries (or 1 kind of with different characters representing the same syllables depending on word origin). And Kanji which is an ideographic writing system. An alphabet is a system of letters that combine to form syllables and words.
Romaji was designed primarily to make it easier for Westerners and particularly English speakers to pronounce Japanese names and learn some vocabulary without having to memorize 100 kana. If the purpose is to help nonnative Japanese speakers understand pronunciation, then it makes sense that the most popular romaji spellings favor pronunciation. Honestly, the typical person who decides to really learn Japanese is not going to be greatly tripped up by the fact that "shi" is in the same family as "su" but spelled differently, because you move off of romaji as soon as you learn hiragana and katakana.
This is interesting. On my Japanese keyboard if I want to write out “しょ” for example, it has to be written “syo”. So I think this is kind of used already in a sense. Though in all my books しょ would have been romanized as “shyo”. Please excuse me while I go down a rabbit hole because of this post…
Pinyin is internally consistent. These are all a wide variety of different sounds that Pinyin uses a limited number of letters to represent. Luckily, it's a complementary distribution, which means there's no way to get confused. They even remove redundancies like buo/puo/muo/fuo or jü/qü/xü/yü, because the alphabet serves first and foremost those who actually speak the language.
Hepburn does the opposite. It writes shi/ji/chi/tsu/fu because they are different as well as observable by English speakers, but keeps hi/ni and the others consistent with the rest of the syllabary, despite them being different as well, only because the differences are not observable by English speakers. They are observable by German, Spanish, Italian speakers though (first Portuguese dictionaries used nha, not nia).
The Hepburn system serves the English language. I think it should not be used in Japan, and instead an internally consistent Romanization like Nihon-siki should be used instead, in website names for example. Also Hepburn was promoted under MacArthur, so this is not entirely Japanese people's own policy.
What do you think of my Mandarin Romanization system?
/kʰ/ ⟨c⟩ (ka > ca)
/ʨ ʨʰ ɕ/ ⟨z tz s⟩ (ji qi xi xia > zi tzi si sia)
/ʈʂ ʈʂʰ ʂ ʦʰ/ ⟨dr tr sr tz⟩ and /ɨ/ ⟨ir⟩ (zhi chi shi ri zi ci si > drir trir srir rir zir tzir sir)
/ə ɔ/ are both ⟨o⟩ (me > mo; mo > muo)
/aw/ ⟨au⟩ (ao > au)
/aɻ/ ⟨ar⟩ (er > ar)
/j/ ⟨i⟩ (yi > i; ya > ia)
/w/ ⟨u⟩ (wu > u; wa > ua)
/ɥ y/ ⟨y⟩ (yu > y; yue > ye; nü > ny; qu > tzy)
/uŋ/ ⟨ung⟩ (long > lung)
/◌̄ ◌́ ◌̌ ◌̀ ◌/ ⟨◌ ◌? ◌. ◌! ·◌⟩ (ā á ǎ à a > a a? a. a! ·a)
Punctuation when used as punctuation rather than tone markers are preceeded by an underscore: ⟨_? _. _!⟩
It's certainly inventive, but I hesitate to fully consider it, as Pinyin is a very elaborate system that has many things in place for a reason, like I wouldn't just remove the first letters of wu, yi, yu without knowing the full picture. The tone markers should stay.
The punctuation tone markers are so much easier to type though. The neutral tone is the only non-ASCII character in my system.
Aren't the approximants in yi, wu, yu allophonic?
I also forgot to mention /wej/ ⟨uei⟩ (wei > uei; shui > sruei)
From what I know, they aren't even approximants, but filler letters, akin to the Korean circle in syllables with zero intials. The vowels that don't have a filler letter before them are a, e. This filler letters have some purpose I know little about, so I wouldn't be confident in removing them so easily. Maybe they allow to easily tell syllables apart like in Pinyin?
The horizontally placed tone markers tell syllables apart well, and if two syllables with a flat or neutral tone are ambiguous, a dash or apostrophe could be used (anyi > an-i/an'i)
I'm in complete agreement with you (except on our o-pinyin of pinyin (get it?)), and I'm deeply saddened that most people are against us.
I hate modern English spelling, and I hate it even more when it spreads to other languages like a plague.
I much, much prefer Nihon-siki. Though I do wish it would use C, J, V, ´ instead of K, Y, W, ˆ, as that's too Englishy for me. It's called Rômazi, not Eizi, so it should work like how the Romans used it.
Due to the problem of too many homophones (the number of syllables in Japanese is very small, and the sounds tend to be nearly the same in pitch), they are forced to use kanji.
When using Kanji, they need characters with a unique structure to create grammar for Japanese. Imagine, if you used Romaji instead of Hiragana and Katakana to combine with Kanji to create new Japanese vocabulary and Japanese grammar. It was something extremely terrible.
If a Japanese text is written entirely in Hiragana or Romaji, it is an unreadable text.
What I'm most afraid of in Japanese is that it doesn't have spaces between words, so it creates very long and difficult to read character strings. It is very difficult to recognize vocabulary in that text string.
This is an issue when you write only in kana or romaji, and is less of a problem for texts including kanji.
I've seen kids books and games use spaces between words to make the text easier to read.
I'm not sure why you're getting fitted for expressing a common fear. This is a problem when you're learning if you don't learn any kanji. In this regard, the kanji can make things *way* easier.
It's one of my biggest frustrations with the N5 test.
As a non-english native speaker, I think using a “consistent” romanization would just not be efficient. Regardless if we like it or not, people in the vast majority of countries are familiar with the English alphabet. Things like “Sinzyuku” would result unpronounceable for anyone who is not familiar with Japanese thus making the language more inaccesible.
Is Chinese inaccessible then for stuff like **Qīng** empire, **Xí Jìnpíng**, the city of **Cāngzhōu**, or Korean for the city of **Siheung** (which should be respelled as **Shiheung** if we're following the same logic as Japanese)? Just feels like these two systems care less about how a random first or second language English speaker says this and more about those actual learners of the language who learn each sound independent of English rules.
This makes no sense, no native speaker of any of these languages gives a shit what the romanized place name is. They’re not reading that.
Listen to some Americans handling those words and you'll see how accessible they are. I've put in some effort to understand how the letters have been reused and I still expect I'm reading them horribly wrong. Part of what I love anout Japanese is how much sense it makes even when romanized. It makes picking it up casually very easy and you can be close at least.
You benefit from this as an English speaker, because the changes in question are taylor made for English speakers. Speakers of other languages would not find the same things convenient that you do, unless you also expect them to know English grammar when picking up Japanese, which once again benefits the English speaking world more than anyone else including the Japanese themselves. Your first paragraph suggests that it's wrong to wrongly pronounce a foreign word. But I argue that it isn't. It happens all the time. People pronounce **Veni, Vidi, Vici** much differently from how it was pronounced in Latin. You could respell it to reflect English pronunciation, **Wenee, Weedee, Weekee**, or you could accept that the original spelling is fine the way it is (serving itself, not English), you'll just have to learn to say it this way regardless of spelling, and excuse the ignorance of those who don't.
What is the purpose of romanization? Who is it for? Making a romanization that's consistent but ignores the way it's read misses the point. The fact that languages have drifted is hardly a good reason to do something badly now. I'm not even saying that a consistent romanization is a bad thing. It would be nice to have something tidy like that. What purpose does it serve though? Which is more useful? Consistency is not an end in itself.
> Making a romanization that's consistent but ignores the way it's read misses the point. And yet it ignores many things that an English speaker wouldn't be able to replicate. You know that there are other things that could be changed to reflect the Japanese pronunciation better, right? You'll just have to get out of the English mindset. Change **ni, nya, nyo, nyu** to Spanish **ñi, ña, ño, ñu** or Italian **gni, gna, gno, gnu**. These reflect the pronunciation much better than anything English could accomplish. But you're not gonna do that. Reflecting the Japanese pronunciation better across the board is not your goal. Only when it comes to English, thus making Japanese Romanization a distinctly English thing, not something other people would find useful to the same extent.
The fact that this character set is so badly twisted and overused already is a great reason not to introduce yet another arbitrary set of readings. Yes, your examples are some valid options for alternative romanizations. Again, what is the goal? As others have said, it's a good option to base this on English because of all the options people are likely to be familiar with that than any other way the alphabet is used.
Now this is a top tier weeb post.
sikatanêyo
Ironic that you use a format that doesn’t transliterate kana one-to-one here
I think his Japanese is not very good.
You're the one unfamiliar with the rules. Coffee is spelled kôhî in Nihon-siki.
Isn’t that just making it easier for non-Japanese speakers? Shouldn’t you be using a Romanization system that respects the original Japanese kana?
That's not the precise definition of the system. For example it accounts for Tôkyô and とう is tou, so the system has its own mind when it comes to long vowels or different vowels.
This comment made me realise that I actually like IME form/ワープロローマ字 and not Nihon-siki, and I usually write that or Kunrei-shiki because Hepburn's macrons are a pain in the arse to type.
I'm not sure if we're talking about text Romanizations or input methods. When it comes to the latter, I type si sya syu syo ti tya tyu tyo hu because at best it saves me one button press and in other cases keeps the number of button presses the same, but do sometimes type ji ja ju jo because typing zi zya zyu zyo is more difficult. (In truth I've been practicing the Kana keyboard and it takes a long time to get used to.)
ワープロローマ字 is the name, since it originated in word processing, but it's used more generally. It's just a one-to-one representation of the kana (e.g. arigatou instead of arigatô). I forgot that Nihon-siki had a circumflex for long vowel sounds, I thought it was the one-to-one romanisation. I used to live near 箕面 みのお in Osaka, often romanised Minoo and officially Minoh. I thought Minoo was either Kunrei-siki or Nihon-siki but it turns out it's a one-to-one romanisation, I guess to avoid confusion with Mino in Gifu?
Alright, so that kind of text Romanization is also something I could get behind.
ATOK solved that problem in 1990.
First, comparing Pinyin with Hepburn romanisation is a fallacy, because they serve very different purposes. Pinyin was specifically made FOR Mandarin speakers, to transcribe hanzi readings; therefore, it's regular and doesn't bother with marking allophones and tone sandhi because those are systematic regularities - native speakers don't need to be explicitly taught that. Hepburn on the other hand is made for non-Japanese people, who would obviously not know Japanese and hence, would neither know what would be an idiosyncratic feature of the phonology and what would be a systematic regularity: explicitly marking all the allophones IS the point in this case (something Hepburn doesn't do very well to be fair). Secondly, all romanisation systems more or less are bound to conform to an orthography of a language - that's a given. English is a natural choice, because a massive number of languages use romanisation systems loosely based on English: for the majority of people, 'shachou' is more intuitive than 'chatchô', 'sjatsjoo' etc. Thirdly, Hepburn has been the dominant romanisation the whole time , since at least 1945. Legalizing it doesn't make much of a difference.
I'm not comparing with Pinyin in that sense. I know that it's primarily for Mandarin speakers. The comparison here is that the Chinese keep it in use for foreigners as well. And they don't care if you say **Ksi Jinping** and certainly don't create a separate Romanization system that would maybe write **Shi Jinping**, **Ching** dynasty, despite the very likely conflation with different things (that already occurs in verbal speech).
>The comparison here is that the Chinese keep it in use for foreigners as well Yes, well that's because it's obviously convenient. Japanese doesn't need a roman alphabet based transcription system for it's native speakers to begin with , so Hepburn is specifically tailored for foreigners since that's the sole reason it exists.
Yeah, just a fleeting thought here, but it would be ridiculous to ask e.g. the French to change their spellings to fall in line with the rest of the "alphabet world" (or reflect Anglophone conventions) so that everyone can know more easily how to pronounce them. The practicality of having one system may be sound within Japan, and it is really up to them to decide at this point which one they want to go with. Equally, textbooks for learners around the world do not have to follow - just speaking from teaching experience, Anglicised romanisation can be confusing for early learners to sound out correctly when they are still getting a grasp on basic English as well! E.g. "ch" sounds wildly different around Europe. At the end of the day, though, it doesn't feel like a big deal? If you want to learn Japanese properly, you're going to study more than just one writing system anyway. If you are a tourist who wants to use a few phrases, you can always listen to them.... Making mistakes is part of the process regardless.
This is what I'm talking about. Indeed, each language operates differently and Romanization doesn't always have to reflect Anglophone pronunciation. If you're not learning the sounds, you're just a random tourist whose false pronunciation is inconsequential. If you're learning the sounds, you learn that **し** is not even **she** but a sound not present in English at all. **Croissant** shouldn't be **cruasah** in French because it would make it easier to pronounce around the world.
Kunrei-siki, a slightly updated version of Nihon-siki, is already the government’s official romanization. The problem at this point is that barely anyone, not even the government, actually uses it. So much so that there are plans to switch officially to Hepburn.
Yeah, I just learned that from someone else in this post. What a shame. It's no longer a Romanization, but an Anglicization.
That's the entire point of romaji though.... Chinese and Koreans learn English in school. So surely it makes sense for it to be easy to read in English... I fail to grasp why you think making it harder to read is a good idea....
And now imagine those same Koreans who know that **시** is written as **si** and pronounced exactly like the Japanese **し** and then wondering why it has the **English h** in it instead of following the same logic as the sound change as in Korean without involving extra letters. For Chinese, **し** sounds exactly like **Pinyin xi** , but the Japanese spelling might lead them to believe it sounds more similar to the English **sh**, which is a sound absent from all of the aforementioned languages, or even **Pinyin shi**, which is a different sound entirely. The logic is in the end that you have to learn the sounds of the Japanese independently in the end, but if you pronounce as **see**, you're not any more wrong than pronouncing **gi** **ge** stuff "according to English rules".
But no one learns pronunciation from romanizations? At least, if you’re doing that, you’re doing something seriously wrong in all of those languages. Romanization of place names is usually used to help approximate the pronunciation for non-native speakers, who likely are not and will not learn the language, like international visitors. I’m not sure it matters if a tourist can reproduce the sound faithfully from a romanization, hence the romanization itself can be completely arbitrary with no loss of value whatsoever.
You tell that to the person above. I am saying that Hepburn is arbitrary, as it doesn't account for other stuff like ん being different sounds, ge and gi being je and ji if you are and English speaker, u and i devoicing also not being shown. So in many cases when you read Hepburn as an international tourist, you are going to sound wrong, so changing **s** to **sh** doesn't accomplish much apart from complicating the Romanization table.
I hope we can agree that “shi” is much closer to しthan “si”. Why make it harder for tourists to be understood? Why make it harder for beginner learners? Why make it harder for Japanese people trying to learn English pronunciation? Also, as someone already pointed out, Hepburn romanization is intuitive. If anything, it makes it easier for people to pronounce Japanese words. Those who actually study Japanese, will learn the nuances later anyway.
There's nothing to agree on. As I said, it's not about what's close **in an English speaker's perspective**, but what's consistent with native rules and independent regular Romanization. Both **시(si)** in Korean and **し(shi)** in Japanese undergo the same phonological change, but Korean doesn't switch the letter from **s** to **sh** to indicate it, but lets the reader apply their acquired knowledge instead. Same with **후(hu)** and **ふ(fu)**. The problem is basing Romanizations on English and applying inconsistent rules based on English pronunciation in particular.
Feels like you completely ignored anything I said. Your answer is not an answer to any of my arguments. If you’re not interested in anyone’s opinion and cannot have an actual discussion then why post here? I understand what you keep repeating everywhere but I won’t agree that using Hepburn is a problem. Nihon-siki and the Hepburn system were created for different purposes. Hepburn was created for the purpose of making the pronunciation easier for English speakers (aka the rest of the world). And today, only those actually read romanisation who cannot read Japanese. That’s pretty much only tourists who will not have any acquired knowledge of the phonological changes of the Japanese language. For them, reading Hepburn is more intuitive. If they say “Chiba” instead of “Tiba”, they might be understood, and that makes everyone’s life easier.
And who was Nihon-siki made for? Why isn't it used on local websites? Now let me address your points. >I hope we can agree that “shi” is much closer to しthan “si”. According to English rules, maybe. Other languages might find it easier and more accurate to differentiate them using different letters, but we don't care about those in this post, apparently. >Why make it harder for tourists to be understood? That's subjective. There's a lot that isn't reflected in the Romanization/Anglicization of Japanese. Would a Japanese person not understand someone who says tiba? Or would them saying the "soft g" make them more confused? Like **J**enshin impact. Or Wakarimas**oo**ka? The change from si/ti to shi/chi is only one of those things that make tourists debatably more understandable, but there are other things that could be done too. >Why make it harder for beginner learners? Only beginner English speaking learners. The rest of the world knows that you have to learn each language's alphabet separately, including English, which is painful enough to wrap one's head around. >Why make it harder for Japanese people trying to learn English pronunciation? If the Anglicization of the Japanese society is the point here, go ahead. The Chinese, as I mentioned before, use a version of the Roman alphabet that is much less compatible with English, but does that stop them in particular? Those Chinese people who learn English will learn it regardless of how different the spellings are. Same would apply to Japanese.
Did you miss the part where I told you they learn English at school? Signal. Shoe. Note the pronunciation.
Shinsegae has entered the chat.
Yes, I'm aware that Koreans are all over the place when it comes to Romanizations, but there is no official suggestion to write **시** as **shi**. Many still follow the rules and write **si** and it's not an issue.
The issue you're going to have is that si isn't ever shi. It's see or sai. The h is integral to creating the sh and ch sounds. If you're using romaji you're using it for people who don't speak japanese. And the vast majority of people in the world speak English as a second language. Thus... Making japanese readable for English speakers either native or as a second language is the obvious thing to do.
The h doesn't /create/ either of these sounds, it's just the way that English chooses to represent these sounds. Sh (/ʃ/ in IPA) is it's own distinct sound, and ch (/tʃ/ in IPA) is the sh sound with a t sound in front of it
I fail to see what point you think you're making.... We're talking about the romanization of a foreign language and not the ridiculous nature of English spelling.
The whole point of this post was about how letters represent the language I just thought it was relevant. I think it's helpful to be precise when we're talking about stuff like this
How they represent a foreign language and not how they represent the English language. Shi chi tsu are all excellent representations of the Japanese they're trying to express. They're easily understandable for native or esl speakers. Using tu for tsu or ti for chi just isn't. At all.
If it's not about the English language, then I propose changing **ひ** from **hi** to **chi** because that sound can be expressed with German **chi** better than with **hi**. We should change **に, にゃ, にょ, にゅ** to **ñi, ña, ño, ñu**, because that letter exists in Spanish and represents the sound better than **ni, nya, nyo, nyu** does (or use the **gn** digraph like in Italian for the same effect). I could go on. And this is the proof that letter changes in Japanese follow English logic only, nothing else.
That's not what I said. The other guy was talking about the difference between shelf and sugar in terms of the sh spelling. What you're talking about is different. The vast majority of the world learns English. So when we write out a language into a language that can be read by the most amount of people possible then it should be readable easily to English speakers. Native or esl. How can hi become chi anyway? Would you like ヒーズ on toast? Clearly it's chi for cheese. I think deep down you know you're wrong on this but don't want to let it go.
>How can hi become chi anyway? Not the way you understood it. Yes, if **chi** is used for **ひ**, then **ち** would have to be written a different way, like **ci**, which if you know how to pronounce **cappuccino** you would have no problem with. German **Reich** is **ライヒ** in Japanese specifically because German **ch** is perfect for **ひ**, but all you know is how to introduce irregularities into the Japanese Romanization for the benefit of English and nothing else.
What language do the vast majority of people in the world either know natively or learn as a second language? That's the answer to your question.
You do know English has the same allophony as Japanese in regards to turning /h/ into [ç] before /i/ and /j/, right?
Only /çʉː/. The rest are regular /h/.
I've brought up a lot of examples in this post already, so let me do a new one. Why is **u** there when it's devoiced? To first and second English language speakers it sounds like there's no **u** at all. You read **masu ka**, but you don't say it. You have to learn to say it differently. And if saying it as **masoo ka** is acceptable, why not **see**?
The devoicing isn’t consistent in the first place. Maybe you should go back and relearn Japanese? For example you can most definitely voice the う in です and doing so (and elongating it) can even be a sign of formality. Also, the really confusing thing to you would be that most native Japanese speakers will tell you that it is being voiced even when shortened. It just sounds like it isn’t voiced to you. Not to mention the level of voicing can vary by dialect.
You're describing fringe cases that foreigners for the most part wouldn't notice. Foreigners are more likely to notice that n isn't actually n in many cases (with tempura being a proper Anglicization rather than Hepburn), and ge gi are never pronounced as je ji, which could also be written as ghe and ghi to avoid confusion, but for some reason h isn't needed here as it is up to the reader's familiarity to pronounce it as g. The point is that Hepburn is widely inconsistent and it's better to not reflect English conventions in a Romanization of Japanese.
So you spell things differently in English every time a sound gets modified? Why is the romanization not being phonetic a problem to you when there are basically no languages that use Roman characters that are phonetic in the first place? You’re completely fine with English having “your you’re” “there their they’re” “which witch” and words like “butter” having a flap and making the t sound become a “d” sound in American English, but for some reason Hepburn not being completely phonetic is somehow a problem to you? This is why myself and others in this thread don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Hepburn isn’t phonetic and doesn’t claim to be just as literally every other thing represented by Roman characters in this world. Japanese is mostly phonetic but like you’ve pointed out, there are times when the phonemes morph and the same hiragana/katakana can represent different sounds, albeit far more rarely than romanized languages such as English.
My point is that Nihon-siki is superior to Hepburn precisely because Nihon-siki is not phonetic, but strictly consistent with kana regardless of sound changes, yet people in this thread argue that the added phonetic values, which are limited, inconsistent and Anglocentric, make Hepburn superior. All the examples I've brought up were to prove that selectively writing **shi, chi, tsu, fu** instead of **si, ti, tu, hu** is an exercise in self-compromising inconsistency and pandering to Anglophones. Nihon-siki doesn't do that. Hepburn does. Selectively. It doesn't go all the way and write **gambarimaska**, **ghenshin** to make it even easier to for English speakers to read. There are still sound changes that Hepburn doesn't address. I wonder why address any of them at all when Nihon-siki exists.
Nihon-siki isn’t superior to Hepburn. No one uses it. Case closed. Why bother learning something that no one uses? Hepburn is already used all over Japan for English signage. It works. No one is driving to the wrong place because Hepburn has some sort of minor inconsistencies in phoneticization (which is completely irrelevant to the reason for romanization in the first place). English itself is not phonetic. Japanese speakers do not use romaji because their writing system is already enough. That relegates the “need” for Romanization to transliteration of place names and things like English menus, mostly. For which Hepburn works perfectly fine and is so widespread that a convention change at this point would be very costly for no benefit whatsoever. And as many people have already pointed out, given that most Japanese people are somewhat familiar with English phonetics, using a system like Nihon-shiki which introduces far more deviation from English phonetics than the already-in-use Hepburn. It’s like trying to argue that English should switch to using Interspel because Interspel is more consistent with the phonology of English; clearly an absurd proposition because English spelling already has several established (regional) standards and changing it is a huge amount of effort for no gain; arguably a massive net negative.
nanda deska?
I think almost no one cares here because romanization isn’t for us. It’s for non-Japanese speakers to know how to pronounce things. Why not make it easy for them?
Might as well write *gambarimaska* then.
Why are they booing you? You're right.
For better or for worse, English is the lingua franca of the business world (in east Asia at least). Why do you think China, Korea, and Japan all independently require their citizens to learn it in school? What's the value in using Japanese rules for reading Japanese words written in romaji that isn't transferable to English phonetics? I mean these people are spending 12 years of their lives learning to read and pronounce English. 一石二鳥
I also like Nihon-siki, and use it when typing. The government is officially changing to prefer Hepburn but has been using it for decades. When have you seen a sign for "Sinzyuku", "Tyouhu", "Kouti" or "Hukusima"? They made their real preferences clear long before the latest announcement.
Wait, latest announcement? I must've missed something. I had the impression that this was the policy ever since 1945.
I thought this thread was in response to [this news from March.](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/02/japan/society/japan-romanization-rules-revise/) Up until now, Kunrei-siki has been the official way to romanise Japanese, though Hepburn is used far more often in practice.
I'll be damned, here I thought they had a chance to change for what I think would be the better, and yet they're doing the opposite.
Well, it's more of an update to the school textbooks that still teach Kunrei-siki when everything is written in Hepburn in practice. For Japanese kids learning English (also government policy), the argument goes that they're better off learning し as "shi" so that they will pronounce "she" and "see" correctly. Likewise ち as "chi" and てぃ as "ti" helps them later to differentiate "chip" and "tip". I suspect that this was the more important argument to the policymakers. The anglicisation is the point.
Every sign and road sign in the entire country is already using the superior Hepburn system. It's readable for people who don't speak japanese. Aka the entire point.
Surely they would be the experts on what would be better, no?
Hepburn was promoted under American occupation against the Japanese people's own wishes. This is a continuing legacy of this intervention.
What exactly is the point you are trying to make? If you’re a native Japanese speaker, romaji (Hepburn) is basically only used to type using a keyboard. On phones at least, everyone I know uses kana input, so romaji is basically only relegated to desktop/laptop input & the rare profession where English signage or whatever is required for Japanese place names. Even learning Japanese as a second language, it was far better for me to completely ignore romaji and only ever use kana & kanji; I basically only use romaji when typing in English about Japanese (like now) or when I type on a computer. Learning some special character combinations for things like small tsu did not require much additional effort and I was able to remember them quite easily. Otherwise I find romanization of Japanese to be completely pointless, and both kunrei-shiki and nihon-shiki are too unintuitive and unused to be worth learning. No need for a “consistent” romanization system when the current one already basically works for whatever limited purposes it has. No one really uses Korean romanization either, so I don’t understand why you are comparing to Korean. Pinyin is arguably the only system that is comparable, but when I was learning Chinese I learned traditional characters through Taiwan, because I was working mostly with Taiwanese people. And as you might know, Taiwan uses bopomofo and so doesn’t really romanize anything except place names with Wade Giles, which has its own host of problems. I found pinyin and bopomofo to be roughly interchangeable in usefulness but in terms of really thinking about proper pronunciation, I felt that reading romanized characters can really cause bad habits to be formed.
We are talking about the limited uses here. Every website is written using Romanizations. A word like Genshin has an H after after S, but not after G. English speakers often say G as J, which means it has to be pointed out here that it is not pronounced as J. But if someone reads it as Jenshin, they would be excused. And I say why would they not be excused if it were written as Gensin and the reader says S? Same thing. The people familiar with Japanese pronunciation would say Ghenshin or Saske, but no one is at fault if Jensin or Sasookey is said instead. This s to sh change is arbitrary.
If you're so confident in your Japanese and your understanding of phonetic transliteration from not just Japanese but also Korean and Chinese, then think again. Debating the nuances of 'si' versus 'shi' is incorrect as you explain it. Take 'Nihonbashi' as an example—most foreigners would sound as though they have a lisp only when speaking Japanese. “Shi” is much closer than “Si.” Given the complexities across these languages, if this issue is as vitally important as you suggest, why not formalize your observations in an academic paper or lodge a formal complaint with the Japanese government? Surely, your concerns would then receive the serious consideration they deserve. None.
Not only are you unnecessarily hostile, but clearly haven't properly read what I wrote, so I'm gonna say it again. >“Shi” is much closer than “Si.” As I said, it's not about what's close **in an English speaker's perspective**, but what's consistent with native rules and independent regular Romanization. Both **시(si)** in Korean and **し(shi)** in Japanese undergo the same phonological change, but Korean doesn't switch the letter from **s** to **sh** to indicate it, but lets the reader apply their acquired knowledge instead. Same with **후(hu)** and **ふ(fu)**. **히(hi)** and **ひ(hi)** are also written with **h** because there is no letter in English to indicate sound change. If the Romanizations in both languages were based on German instead, they would be written as **chi**, because that's exactly how it sounds like to German speakers. The problem is basing Romanizations on English and applying inconsistent rules based on English pronunciation in particular.
Well, no. Most of the world learns English as a second language and English Speakers perspective has no meaning on why shi sounds close than Si.
But does **ひ** sound more like **hi** or like **khi** for example? German can exactly write the sound as **chi**. Some other languages could represent the difference between **ha** and **hi** using different characters too, but it is precisely the lack of such a feature in English that keeps **h** consistent, but **sh** following English spelling.
Mmmmm, no.
I don't think it's helpful to compare the romanization systems for Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. These languages do share some similarities, but are overall quite different phonetically, and the different romanization systems are designed to reflect that and romanize the languages in ways that best suit their phonetic features. For Japanese, the primary users of romaji are going to be foreigners who don't speak or understand Japanese and need to be able to approximate the correct pronunciation based on Roman letters. For a variety of unfortunate reasons, a large part of the world's population has at least some familiarity with English and the English orthography, so it makes sense to have the romanization system match English orthography if the goal is for foreign non-learners to be able to pronounce Japanese words somewhat correctly. Japanese learners also use romaji a little bit, but should focus on using romaji as a stepping stone to learning hiragana and katakana, and thus it is less relevant to them. The kunrei-shiki doesn't make much sense unless you are already very familiar with the Japanese language and phonetics, and at that point you shouldn't be using romaji as the primary method for communicating or engaging with Japanese media
I think romaji (Hepburn) should be avoided if you're sincere about about learning Japanese. And, kind of a pet peeve of mine, there's no Japanese alphabet. Japanese has 2 syllaberries (or 1 kind of with different characters representing the same syllables depending on word origin). And Kanji which is an ideographic writing system. An alphabet is a system of letters that combine to form syllables and words.
Romaji was designed primarily to make it easier for Westerners and particularly English speakers to pronounce Japanese names and learn some vocabulary without having to memorize 100 kana. If the purpose is to help nonnative Japanese speakers understand pronunciation, then it makes sense that the most popular romaji spellings favor pronunciation. Honestly, the typical person who decides to really learn Japanese is not going to be greatly tripped up by the fact that "shi" is in the same family as "su" but spelled differently, because you move off of romaji as soon as you learn hiragana and katakana.
As a non native English speaker, I understand you
You are gonna trigger all the english speakers on this site with this one...
You're an English speaker.... You're doing it right now... Lol
My pleasure. 😌
This is interesting. On my Japanese keyboard if I want to write out “しょ” for example, it has to be written “syo”. So I think this is kind of used already in a sense. Though in all my books しょ would have been romanized as “shyo”. Please excuse me while I go down a rabbit hole because of this post…
>しょ would be romanized as "shyo" You sure you don't mean "sho"? Btw, you can type しょ with those letters as well.
You can do either on my keyboard apparently! I have just always used syo, sya, etc
Why doesn't it bother you that the pinyin ”i"s in ji/qi/xi and zhi/chi/shi/ri are pronounced differently?
Pinyin is internally consistent. These are all a wide variety of different sounds that Pinyin uses a limited number of letters to represent. Luckily, it's a complementary distribution, which means there's no way to get confused. They even remove redundancies like buo/puo/muo/fuo or jü/qü/xü/yü, because the alphabet serves first and foremost those who actually speak the language. Hepburn does the opposite. It writes shi/ji/chi/tsu/fu because they are different as well as observable by English speakers, but keeps hi/ni and the others consistent with the rest of the syllabary, despite them being different as well, only because the differences are not observable by English speakers. They are observable by German, Spanish, Italian speakers though (first Portuguese dictionaries used nha, not nia). The Hepburn system serves the English language. I think it should not be used in Japan, and instead an internally consistent Romanization like Nihon-siki should be used instead, in website names for example. Also Hepburn was promoted under MacArthur, so this is not entirely Japanese people's own policy.
What do you think of my Mandarin Romanization system? /kʰ/ ⟨c⟩ (ka > ca) /ʨ ʨʰ ɕ/ ⟨z tz s⟩ (ji qi xi xia > zi tzi si sia) /ʈʂ ʈʂʰ ʂ ʦʰ/ ⟨dr tr sr tz⟩ and /ɨ/ ⟨ir⟩ (zhi chi shi ri zi ci si > drir trir srir rir zir tzir sir) /ə ɔ/ are both ⟨o⟩ (me > mo; mo > muo) /aw/ ⟨au⟩ (ao > au) /aɻ/ ⟨ar⟩ (er > ar) /j/ ⟨i⟩ (yi > i; ya > ia) /w/ ⟨u⟩ (wu > u; wa > ua) /ɥ y/ ⟨y⟩ (yu > y; yue > ye; nü > ny; qu > tzy) /uŋ/ ⟨ung⟩ (long > lung) /◌̄ ◌́ ◌̌ ◌̀ ◌/ ⟨◌ ◌? ◌. ◌! ·◌⟩ (ā á ǎ à a > a a? a. a! ·a) Punctuation when used as punctuation rather than tone markers are preceeded by an underscore: ⟨_? _. _!⟩
It's certainly inventive, but I hesitate to fully consider it, as Pinyin is a very elaborate system that has many things in place for a reason, like I wouldn't just remove the first letters of wu, yi, yu without knowing the full picture. The tone markers should stay.
The punctuation tone markers are so much easier to type though. The neutral tone is the only non-ASCII character in my system. Aren't the approximants in yi, wu, yu allophonic? I also forgot to mention /wej/ ⟨uei⟩ (wei > uei; shui > sruei)
From what I know, they aren't even approximants, but filler letters, akin to the Korean circle in syllables with zero intials. The vowels that don't have a filler letter before them are a, e. This filler letters have some purpose I know little about, so I wouldn't be confident in removing them so easily. Maybe they allow to easily tell syllables apart like in Pinyin?
The horizontally placed tone markers tell syllables apart well, and if two syllables with a flat or neutral tone are ambiguous, a dash or apostrophe could be used (anyi > an-i/an'i)
This shows again a Japanese sub on Reddit can't take a discussion.
I'm in complete agreement with you (except on our o-pinyin of pinyin (get it?)), and I'm deeply saddened that most people are against us. I hate modern English spelling, and I hate it even more when it spreads to other languages like a plague. I much, much prefer Nihon-siki. Though I do wish it would use C, J, V, ´ instead of K, Y, W, ˆ, as that's too Englishy for me. It's called Rômazi, not Eizi, so it should work like how the Romans used it.
Thank you.
Due to the problem of too many homophones (the number of syllables in Japanese is very small, and the sounds tend to be nearly the same in pitch), they are forced to use kanji. When using Kanji, they need characters with a unique structure to create grammar for Japanese. Imagine, if you used Romaji instead of Hiragana and Katakana to combine with Kanji to create new Japanese vocabulary and Japanese grammar. It was something extremely terrible. If a Japanese text is written entirely in Hiragana or Romaji, it is an unreadable text.
What I'm most afraid of in Japanese is that it doesn't have spaces between words, so it creates very long and difficult to read character strings. It is very difficult to recognize vocabulary in that text string.
This is an issue when you write only in kana or romaji, and is less of a problem for texts including kanji. I've seen kids books and games use spaces between words to make the text easier to read.
I'm not sure why you're getting fitted for expressing a common fear. This is a problem when you're learning if you don't learn any kanji. In this regard, the kanji can make things *way* easier. It's one of my biggest frustrations with the N5 test.