Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/08/21/japan/panel-hepburn-style-romanization/

by rgovostes • 7 months ago

273 212 7 months ago

japantimes.co.jp

rfarley042• 7 months 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.

kazinator19• 7 months ago

In the first place, "romanization" of English is unstandardized! Or was that unstandardised?

adastra223• 7 months ago

It tends to be standardized within a single country.

Stevvo• 7 months ago

Thailand, famously, was never colonized by European powers. Everywhere else, some colonial administrator standardized a system of romanization.

floren• 7 months ago

Japan was not colonized, although it was briefly occupied.

petesergeant• 7 months 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.

graemep2• 7 months 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.

ilamont• 7 months 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 (https://pinyin.info/news/2019/article-on-early-tongyong-piny...).

The chart halfway down this blog post lays out some of the challenges once the hanyu pinyin standard was instituted in 2009:

https://frozengarlic.wordpress.com/on-romanization/

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.

jerriep• 7 months ago

Yeah, my full names are Jeremia Josiah, and on my work permit they wrote the Thai version as เจอเรเมีย โยชิอา. I cannot figure out why they chose to use จ for 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.

rfarley042• 7 months ago

That's hilarious. The one I always notice is ก getting romanized as a K, ie Kanchanaburi or กานต์ becoming Karn.

yongjik• 7 months 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• 7 months 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 fallen 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".

Theofrastus3• 7 months 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.

wyan• 7 months ago

Not closer to the spoken sounds, closer to English orthography.

Theofrastus3• 7 months ago

Native German speaker here. It fits very well here, too

mono442• 7 months ago

It works better with other European languages' orthography too.

mytailorisrich• 7 months 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

Theofrastus3• 7 months ago

The political aspect might be a big part of why and how the systems are chosen. Didn't know about that!

jinushaun• 7 months ago

Politics aside, Hepburn is better. You can’t seriously say you prefer “konniti-ha” and “susi-wo tabemasu”

ranger_danger• 7 months 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.

usrnm• 7 months ago

The popularity of Hepburn has a lot more to do with the English language than the Japanese language

shikon7• 7 months 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?

z2• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Not exactly. In the Wade–Giles system:

xi → hsi ji → chi ci → tz'u

retrac2• 7 months 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.

Macha3• 7 months 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.

mcmoor2• 7 months 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.

tkgally• 7 months 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.

fennecfoxy• 7 months 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.

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

Previously in 2024 (?):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972

dang• 7 months ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

English-friendly Romanization system proposed for Japanese language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42606969 - Jan 2025 (23 comments)

Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972 - March 2024 (97 comments)

kazinator19• 7 months 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.

adastra223• 7 months ago

Is that part of Hepburn? It is not mentioned in the article, nor by most explainers that I’m familiar with.

QuercusMax6• 7 months 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.

layer82• 7 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Long_vowe...

Etheryte• 7 months 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.

lostlogin2• 7 months 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.

Rendello• 7 months 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

bitwize• 7 months 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

Lammy2• 7 months ago

https://github.com/ell1010/wincompose is like the first thing I install on any new Windows machine.

gpvos• 7 months ago

Nope. When on Windows I tend to use one of the US International or the Pseudo VT320 layout from https://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ .

bryanlarsen• 7 months 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.

qingcharles3• 7 months 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?

kazinator19• 7 months 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.

junar• 7 months 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.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/input/japane...

makeitdouble3• 7 months 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.

throwaway20377• 7 months 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.

Tor3• 7 months 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.

numpad02• 7 months 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)とえんそ(Cl)からできています"
  -> "塩はナトリウム(Na)と塩素(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.

johnea• 7 months ago

Hepburn also allows the use of the double vowel, in this case: kooen

domenicd• 7 months ago

It's terrible that Windows still has nothing good for this built-in. I use https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/quick-ac... 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.)

phantasmish2• 7 months ago

Oh no.

This is going to make finding specific Japanese game roms even more annoying.

lbotos• 7 months ago

Elaborate? I’m not following.

phantasmish2• 7 months 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.

quink• 7 months 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.

naniwaduni3• 7 months 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.

qingcharles3• 7 months ago

They need to do the same for a bunch of languages, e.g. Arabic.

WalterBright• 7 months ago

Please bring back Fraktur.

kazinator19• 7 months 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 オー. 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?

nemomarx• 7 months ago

Use Ruby text alongside kanji, maybe?

sdovan1• 7 months ago

FWIW, it's HTML ruby tag, not the language.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

Macha3• 7 months 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.

juancn• 7 months ago

    The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. 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.

timr5• 7 months ago

They’re not the same. おう is discernible from おお, and the 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.

makeitdouble3• 7 months 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.

retrac2• 7 months 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).

drtgh• 7 months 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)

ursAxZA4• 7 months ago

There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing).

Slightly off-topic, but “karaage” (kara + age) isn’t “crust + 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.

sho• 7 months 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.

kazinator19• 7 months 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.

innocentoldguy4• 7 months 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 (toukyou) and the OO in 大きな (ookina) are different and should be spelled differently. I hope this helps.

EDIT: Added a comma.

kazinator19• 7 months 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 (when you 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 大きな (ookina) are different

No, they are't.

I hope this helps.

こう言うバカな戯言は少しも誰にも役に立つはずないんだぜ。

presentation2• 7 months 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.

the_gipsy• 7 months ago

La li lu le lo?

mc33015• 7 months ago

There's a beach called "らららサンビーチ" in Japan.

While driving there, you can pass a signs that say "LaLaLa Sun Beach" as well as "RaRaRa Sun Beach."

eatsleepmonad• 7 months 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.

akst• 7 months 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.

throwaway20377• 7 months 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?

kevin_thibedeau• 7 months 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".

ehnto2• 7 months 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.

wodenokoto3• 7 months 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.

ehnto2• 7 months 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.

throwaway20377• 7 months 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji

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.

presentation2• 7 months 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.

aidenn03• 7 months 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"

kagevf• 7 months ago

Wikipedia is right; the romanization is just matching how it's rendered in kana.

layer82• 7 months ago

Look at the standard kana table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goj%C5%ABon

mc33015• 7 months ago

Because 少年 in hiragana is しょうねん: spelled out that is "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.

AdamH12113• 7 months 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/こ ka/ki/ku/ke/ko, ま/み/む/め/も ma/mi/mu/me/mo. Some columns have "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/て/と 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 irregular sounds stay irregular: し shi -> じ ji instead of zi, ち chi -> ぢ 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, み mi + よ yo = みょ myo, etc. The irregular sounds remain irregular: し shi + ゆ yu = しゅ shu (instead of syu), ち chi + や ya = ちゃ cha (instead of tya), じ ji + よ yo = じょ jo (instead of 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] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kana_chart_1.png [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/awzw04/kana_... [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 not really the English r sound. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_tap...

mc33015• 7 months 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)?

shevy-java• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

belviewreview• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Impressive drumming skills!

donatj• 7 months 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.

mc33015• 7 months 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.

ptx• 7 months 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"? That's 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...

bentley• 7 months 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.)

SV_BubbleTime• 7 months ago

crackles knuckles

I have Real Real Japan on my YouTube algorithm. So, I’m a bit of an expert on this topic…

mc33015• 7 months ago

How about Dogen?

hilbert424• 7 months 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.

discomrobertul8• 7 months 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 "wrong".

MalikTerm2• 7 months 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.

hilbert424• 7 months 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 they 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.

graemep2• 7 months 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.

numpad02• 7 months 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.

hilbert424• 7 months 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.

MalikTerm2• 7 months 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.

hilbert424• 7 months 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.

throw0101a• 7 months 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.)

apflkx2• 7 months 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 Russians 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 Шинджуку (Shinjuku).

xnikitin• 7 months ago

Minor corrections:

1. It's "Polivanov", not "Polianov".

2. It's "Синдзюку", not "Синдзуку".

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".

apflkx2• 7 months ago

Thanks for the correction!

しんじゅく (Cиндзюку, Sindzyuku) is an interesting 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 Hepburn, hu in Kunrei and fu in Polivanov but し is not shi as in Hepburn, but si as in Kunrei.

nephihaha• 7 months 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.)

dhruv3006• 7 months ago

I read romantic rules.

elif• 7 months ago

Awesome. Learning Japanese as an English speaker was already ridiculously overcomplicated. So pumped to do it all over again.

SpecialistK2• 7 months 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.

Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years

Related Stories