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Comment by speak_plainly | Hacker News Reader

I think this makes sense given the prominence and place English holds in the world.

Hepburn has made Japanese more accessible universally given its phonetic nature and relationship to English. There are many other transliteration systems out there that people are using with their local languages as well.

If you want to see the opposite approach, look at China and Pinyin. It’s made pronunciation of Chinese in English and elsewhere less intuitive. In order to pronounce Chinese words properly you need to learn Pinyin and its phonetic rules. As a result, many Chinese people take on Westernized names to avoid the inevitable butchering, which is a bit of a shame.

While Pinyin was probably the best choice for enhancing literacy in China, it has inadvertently created hurdles for foreigners. In contrast, Japan’s Hepburn system has avoided such challenges.

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> If you want to see the opposite approach, look at China and Pinyin. It’s made pronunciation of Chinese in English and elsewhere less intuitive. In order to pronounce Chinese words properly you need to learn Pinyin and its phonetic rules. As a result, many Chinese people take on Westernized names to avoid the inevitable butchering, which is a bit of a shame.

Taiwanese romanization is way better. It's much closer to English and more readable

Chinese people take Western names because Chinese are very flexible and, especially, because the Chinese naming system is quite alien to Westerners.

There is also the issue of tones, which is the major hurdle for Westerners.

Now as to "you need to learn pinyin and it's rules". Yes, you need to learn and make some effort to pronounce a foreign language. The same goes for any language and it is unavoidable.

that seems like a very anglocentric viewpoint.

sure, maybe for english speakers an english based transliteration might be better. but i'd argue that makes it worse for everyone else.

given how irregular english pronunciation is, i find that a transliteration system is better if it is based on languages with more regular pronunciation of letters.

i don't see how chinese pinyin creates any more hurdles for foreigners in china than say german does for foreigners in germany. (to be fair, i am fluent in both english and german, so maybe i am not a good judge for this)

> sure, maybe for english speakers an english based transliteration might be better. but i'd argue that makes it worse for everyone else.

Certainly not worse than Kunrei-shiki. Hepburn might not be a great match to non-English languages, but it'S still a better one.

If you disagree, show me one language whose speakers would naturally pronounce "Sinzyuku" correctly.

> If you disagree, show me one language whose speakers would naturally pronounce "Sinzyuku" correctly.

Not one language has speakers who will naturally pronounce "Shinjuku" exactly correctly either - no two languages are alike, and it's normal and healthy to have pronunciation differences between languages natively written with the same alphabet (e.g. English speakers will naturally mispronounce many Spanish words - no-one would suggest this means Spanish spelling should change). Plenty of languages (e.g. Irish or Polish) naturally read "Sinzyuku" as something closer to the correct pronunciation than "Shinjuku", which is the only reasonable way to compare.

There's hiragana/katakana for regular transcription of spoken Japanese. I'm guessing that's slightly different situation to Chinese language which does not have a phonographic script.

That sounds backwards to me. Hepburn is widespread because Japan once had a very widespread reach over the world, so much that a system tuned for westerners is inevitably going to appear. Chinese Pinyin is a much later development and widely known Chinese names are indeed written in Pinyin with minor variantions. For example, the name "Beijing" is an unaccented version of Pinyin "Běijīng", and it swiftly replaced a previous spelling "Peking" which was in use for over 4 centuries.

> Hepburn has made Japanese more accessible universally given its phonetic nature and relationship to English.

It's made Japanese more accessible to English-speakers, at the cost of making it less accessible to those from other languages, and making romanised Japanese harder for Japanese people to write, and perhaps even indirectly impeding Japanese learning of English (which is notoriously terrible) as well. This is perhaps a good tradeoff for tourist-oriented materials, but I'm sad to see it becoming the standard.

> As a result, many Chinese people take on Westernized names to avoid the inevitable butchering, which is a bit of a shame.

Plenty of Japanese names are also butchered, whichever romanisation system you use. E.g. "Abe" is romanized that way in either system; "Mazda" and "Ohtani" are deliberately romanized "wrong" (again under either system) for English speakers to mangle them less. IMO taking up a name that's natural in the culture you're operating ends up better for everyone. (I very happily use a Japanese name in Japan rather than trying to get Japanese people to pronounce my birth name).

How is it harder for non-English speakers? Knowing the kana pronunciation for Sinzyuku is way harder than knowing the English pronunciation of Shinjuku for most outside of JP. Also, JP schools already teach English from grade 1 onward so if anything, seeing the English transliteration aligns way better and enforces what they are already being taught. Not to mention katakana spellings and pronunciation which further confuse their learning of English. Previously you effectively had three different representations of foreign words with different spellings, this cuts it down to two which significantly decreases the cognitive overload

> How is it harder for non-English speakers? Knowing the kana pronunciation for Sinzyuku is way harder than knowing the English pronunciation of Shinjuku for most outside of JP.

Only if they're English speakers! If your only language is e.g. Irish then writing that sound as "Shi" is more confusing than writing it as "Si".

> Not to mention katakana spellings and pronunciation which further confuse their learning of English. Previously you effectively had three different representations of foreign words with different spellings, this cuts it down to two which significantly decreases the cognitive overload

Maybe. Or maybe the way Hepburn creates "blurred" words that are partially English and partially Japanese causes more confusion than having a clear distinction between written English and written Japanese words that makes it easier to pronounce each one in the way appropriate to that language (i.e. fully code-switch as fluent bilingual people do).

Yeah those are fair points. I still think that to encourage wider learning and understanding from foreigners, using English as a base model makes sense because it is most widely taught across the world.

As far as the second point, I taught English in Japan and found that while English education starts at an extremely young age, their relative skill is pretty low compared to other countries that do the same. There are a couple of reasons for this but I think further integration of English pronunciation could help in this department while also appealing to the widest swathe of tourists possible.

Another funny thing I’ve found is that the romaji JP iphone keyboard autofills kana and kanji best with hepburn inputs

Kun-rei has a learning cost and no one is paying for it. Hepburn or its close-enough "Ohtani" analogue is free due to (notoriously bad)compulsory English training as well as use of Romaji input on computers, and technical rule conformance to actual Hepburn is never questioned so it wins.

I don't know, I think the real sad part is that everyone knows the casual Hepburn from Romaji popularity; Kana shall be default from a nationalistic, purist, standpoint. Mazda and Ohtani are fine, certainly better than Zhang and Nguyen situation, which are supposed to be pronounced "chan" and "gwen" but being mostly sources of confusion.

Surely the fact that "Chinese" (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc) is tonal while Japanese is not is also a factor.

I mean it probably helps that few, if any Japanese sounds are alien to English speakers. I've studied some Japanese, been several times, can't remember any sounds that were particularly difficult (whereas Japanese speakers definitely struggle with some English sounds, like "th" and "l").

There are intonation aspects that are hard for (native) English speakers, and the syllable speed is higher than English, but the basic sounds are straightforward to grasp.

つ is an unnatural sound for at least some English speakers, and can be hard to distinguish from す. The short/long vowel distinction is also completely alien at first (e.g. people are mostly familiar with the pronunciation of Tōkyō, but the natural reading of "Tokyo" in English would be quite different, starting with a "tock" sound).

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