Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
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?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity.
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.
This is literally not a thing that exists outside of some foreigners' imaginations. You will sooner hear a difference from $1000 speaker cables before you hear this, and it will only be if you are the one who paid.
You may be letting by pitch accent deceive you. In words that contain /o:/ it's possible for that to be a pitch boundary so that pitch rises during the /o:/ and that can contrast against another /o:/ word where that doesn't happen.
The 頬 word in Japanese is "kinda funny" in that it has a ほお variant and a ほほ variant. It has always stood out in my mind as peculiar. I'd swear I've heard an in-between "ほ・お" that sound somewhat reminiscent of "uh oh", with a bit of a volume dip or little stop that makes it sound like two /o/ vowels. It could be that the speaker intends ほほ, but the second /h/ sound is not articulated clearly. It may even be that the ほほ spelling was invented to try to represent this situation (which is a wild guess, based on zero research). In any case, the situation with that cheeky little word doesn't establish anything general about おお/こお/そお/とお...
I've been fooled by my imagination. For instance, many years ago I thought I would swear that I heard the object marker を sound like "WO" in some songs; i.e. exactly how it typed in romaji-based input methods, because it belongs to the わ group. Like "kimi-o" sounding like "kimi-wo". Today I'm convinced it is just a kind of 空耳 (soramimi). Or the artifact of /i/ followed by /o/ without interruption, becoming a dipthong that passes through /u/: it may be real, but unintentional. It's one of those things that if you convince yourself is real, you will tend to interpret what you are hearing in favor of that.
E.g. in Moriama Naotarō's "Kisetsu no mado de" (季節の窓で), right in the first verse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjvNqg3034
That's actually a good example because there are so many covers of that, you can see whether you hear the "whoopy wo" from differnt speakers.
There is a similar situation in the pronunication o 千円. There is a ghost "ye" that appears to the foreign ear. To the point that we have developed the exonym "yen" for the Japanese currency!!! The reality is more like that the /n/ is nasalized, similarly to what happens when it is followed by /g/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg
OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition of the the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 832-833, we have all the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including pitch accents:
ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方、砲、鵬、朴
And, our cheeky word 頬 gets a separate entry here due to its pronunications ホー and ほほ。Both have a falling pitch after the leading ほ, like 方. No difference is noted.
ホー with pitch rising at the "o": 法、報
So of course if you compare someone saying 法律 vs 頬, there will be a difference. But a lot of longer ほお words have the same rising pitch like 法. 法律 (ほうりつ） vs 放り出す （ほおりだす）is the same.
Fairly intuitively, 頬張る（ほおばる）has rising pitch at the お、in spite of 頬 by itself exhibiting falling pitch.
I think you're a little obsessed with this. It's not pitch accent and I'm not "being fooled", but if you want to insist that you know better...fine? You do you!
> OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition of the the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 832-833, we have all the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including pitch accents: ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方、砲、鵬、朴
I've already given you examples where you can often hear the difference if you try. These "ho-words" are completely unrelated, and non-responsive. You seem to be arguing about something else (or just trying to name-drop the NHK pronunciation guide).
Anyway, there are two distinct sounds in the kana table for う and お. They're individually pronounced differently, so why you're so resistant to the idea that combinations of the two might also have a difference in pronunciation, I don't really know. I've personally had native teachers tell me this, and I hear it all the time. Go ask a native to slowly sound out the individual mora for a word like 紅茶 vs. say, 大阪 -- that's how I first heard it.
Anyway, I'm not really interested in debating this further. It's a very, very minor point. Good luck with your study.
Oh no, that totally escaped my feeble attention. Boy, do I feel sheepishly stupid now.
> Go ask a native to slowly sound out the individual mora
In fact, now that you point it out, even if I do that myself, it's obvious they are different: ko-u-cha, o-o-sa-ka!
Well, I've just been going about this all wrong, barking up the wrong tree.
In hindsight it now makes total sense that they wouldn't just use う as a marker to indicate that the previous お is long. Thats what ー is for; whereas う has a sound!
Ohohsaka, coacha: gonna practice that.
If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong.
It is not reliably discernible as a statistical fact you can gather from a population sample of native speakers over many words, if they are asked to speak normally (not using spelling as emphasis, or using the words in a song).
There's literally a different sound, which is why the difference in kana exists. Disagree if you like -- as I said, it's subtle -- but I don't know why you feel the need to be insulting about it. Writing an inaccurate non-kana symbol for the two sounds is no more an argument than saying that the sounds are identical because they share a common romanization.
There are some words where you can more clearly hear the difference than others. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of 紅茶, vs your example of 氷. It's not wrong to pronounce the former as a long o, but you can hear the difference when natives say it. Similarly, こういう is not said as こおいう, and 公園 is not こおえん.
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.
> The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact.
The worst part is the automated checks, and sure it's a huge PITA. I've spent 1h30 last weekend at a docomo shop to have my name recognized by their system, with the guy looking at the papers and not understanding why it wouldn't do it. That's with near perfect matching between the documents. Imagine having spellings mismatched.
Banks also have a different matching system (Katakana based, with a string length limit, for account matching, and another WTF system for card owner matching), which is screwed in its very own way. That's one of the main reasons for the debacle with the MyNumber Card bank account matching last year.
> uniquely identify a foreign resident
Uniquely being identified is the easy part. Being _properly_ identified is something else altogether.
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).
Feel free to try listening yourself though:
頬, note that it has multiple pronunciations but we only care about hoo: https://forvo.com/word/%E9%A0%AC/#ja
方 https://forvo.com/word/%E6%96%B9%E3%80%80%EF%BC%88%E3%81%BB%...
In some cases though there is still a clear difference in pronunciation for most speakers, ex 塔 vs 遠
No it can't, unless someone is spelling it out, or singing it in a song where it is given two notes, or just hyper-correcting their speech based on their knowledge of writing.
Annoyed speech and such can break words into their morae for empahsis, which breaks up dipthongs.
E.g. angry Japanese five-year-old:
ga kkō ni i ki ta ku nā i!!! (I don't wanna go to school!!!)
"nā i" is not the regular way of saying "nai". The idea that "nai" has that as an alternative pronunciation is a strawman.
This kind of misconception seems not uncommon. There's an FAQ on NHK's website [1] that addresses the question of whether 言う（いう） is pronounced "iu" or "yuu". The answer is "yuu", and the article make it clear that: "It's not that [iu] is used for polite/careful speech and [yuu] for casual speech - there is no such distinction."
I think native speakers learn words by hearing them and seeing them written in hiragana, before learning the underlying rules, so they know "too" is written as とう, but might not realize that とう shouldn't be pronounced as "tou" or いう as "iu". These are at least less obvious than cases like は in こんにちは never being "ha".
Personally, if I heard someone say 塔 as "tou" or 言う as "iu", I probably wouldn't count it as incorrect, nor would I even notice the phonetic difference.
[0] https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kiju...
[1] https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/20160801_2.html
I see what you did there.
As a native Japanese speaker, this example is eye-opening. I hadn't even realized that the u in 方 is pronounced as /o:/ — I believe most Japanese people haven't either, despite unknowingly pronounce it that way.
Also, I have no idea how to Hepburn-romanize 方 vs 頬, 負う vs 王, and 塔 vs 遠. If I had to romanize, I would just write it as whatever the romaji input method understands correctly (hou/hoo, ou/ou, and tou/too, in this case).
If you know the word 方, that it is /ho:/, and you know that it has a う in it when written out, how can you not know that う stands for making the o long? The only vowel is the long o.
Japanese kindergarten kids can recognize hiragana words with "おう", correctly identifying it as /o:/. By the time they learn the 方 kanji they would have seen it written in hiragana upmpteen times, like AよりBのほうがいい and whatnot.
When I hear /ho:/ in a certain context, "ほう(方)" immediately comes to mind, without noticing that what I heard was a long o. To me it's just the う sound. And if someone pointed to their face while saying /ho:/, I'd think it's the お sound as in "ほお(頬)".
Every time I read a rule about my mother tongue (Mandarin) online I was like, lol what nonsense foreigners made up... And then I realize that rule does exist. I just have internalized it for so long.
As a counterexample (in line with your explanation), consider someone snarking on the WallStreetBets forum: "Come on, guys, this is supposed to be Wall Street bets, not Wall Street prudent hedges!" Adjective order changes because the intended significance changes. (Normally it would be "prudent Wall Street hedges".)
Side note: please don't nitpick about whether "Wall Street" is functionally an adjective here. The same thing would happen if the forum had been named "FinancialBets".
It's a fool's errand because the way human language works is that people happily accept odd exceptions by rote memory. So the rule simply says that there exist these exceptions. Also, there is something called euphony: speakers find utterances questionable if they are not in some canonical form they are used to hearing. For instance "black & white" is preferred over "white & black".
The rules boil down to "what people are used to hearing, regardless of the underlying grammar offering other possibilities".
(I suppose Wall Street is a proper adjective, like "New York pizza," but you said no nitpicking)
By the way, modifying compounds generally must not be plurals, to the extent that even pluralia tantum words like scissors and pants get forced into a pseudo-singular form in order to serve as modifiers, giving us scissor lift and pant leg, which must not be scissors lift and pants leg.
An example of a noun phrase containing many modifying nouns is something like: law school entrance examination grading procedure workflow.
The order among modifying nouns is semantically critical and different from euphonic adjective order; examples in which modifying nouns are permuted, resulting in strange or nonsensical interpretations, or bad grammar, are not valid for demonstrating constraintsa mong the order of true adjectives which independently apply to their subject.
For instance, red, big house is strange and wants to be big, red house. The house is independently big and red.
This is not related to why entrance examination grading procedure cannot be changed to examination entrance grading procedure. The modifiers do not target the head, but each other. "entrance" applies to "examination", not to "procedure" or "grading".
No, it's ou vs ō.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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。
Why would you want to confuse the hell out of those learning Japanese by spelling せんせい (sensei) using an E with a macron, a la "sensē," when that is not at all how you spell it or type in phonetically in an IME? Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners, who are essentially the target of romanized Japanese, than creating a Hooked on Phonics version that is completely disconnected from writing reality.
I also think your comment, written in Japanese, saying, "This stupid nonsense isn't going to be of any use to anyone," is both ignorant and uncalled for.
Phonetically, in natural speech, the vowel often compresses toward a long /e/ sound, so you may hear something closer to sense or sensee depending on context and speaker.
In stylistic writing (e.g. light novels or dialogue), you might occasionally see phonetic renderings to reflect speech, but in formal or instructional contexts, “sensei” remains the correct and expected form.
In short:
• Orthography: sensei
• Phonetics: can vary in actual speech
• Stylistic writing: sometimes bends toward pronunciation
Different layers, different purposes.
I think this may mostly be a case of people talking past each other.
One side is focusing on orthographic convention (how it’s written and typed), the other on phonetic realization (how it’s actually pronounced in speech).
Those aren’t contradictory claims — they’re just different layers of the same thing.
You owned it — that matters.
I wholeheartedly agree that it is fine to write things like "Sup?" when appropriate, such as dialogue in a novel. You see this all the time in Japanese TV, books, magazines, manga, etc. However, I disagree that elisions should dictate how we spell words in regular written communication, especially when discussing a tool meant to help non-native Japanese speakers learn the language. And as the parent poster pointed out, when singing, you would sing "se n se i" rather than "se n se e." The same is true of haiku and other instances where the morae (linguistic beats similar to syllables in English) are clearly enunciated.
As I said, sensei is technically four morae and different than "sensē," and, in my opinion, should remain that way in Romaji, it being a writing system and one method for inputting Japanese text.
Thanks for the respectful conversation. I appreciate the points you brought up.
Once we separate the layers — orthography, pronunciation, and stylistic rendering — the friction mostly disappears.
Romanization is a writing system with its own conventions; speech naturally undergoes reductions and elisions; and creative writing sometimes pulls closer to the spoken register.
Different layers, different functions — and the confusion only arises when they’re collapsed into one.
Appreciate the thoughtful discussion.
Sorry, yes. That is my mistake. Hepburn doesn't use any such ē notation. Hepburn preserves えい and ええ as "ei" and "ee", conflating only "ou" and "oo" into ō (when they appear in a combination that denotes the long o:).
Hepburn didn’t write “sensē” himself because it 1880s it was still pronounced “ei”, not “ē”. If it were pronounced like it’s pronounced nowadays, you can bet he’d spell it with ē.
It depends on the learner’s (and textbook author’s) goals. Sometimes, having a phonetic transcription of the more common pronunciation is a more important consideration.
Historically, Hepburn’s transcription pre-dates Japanese orthographic reform. He was writing “kyō” back when it was spelled けふ. Having one-to-one correspondence to kana was not a goal.
So writing sensē is kinda on-brand (even if Hepburn didn’t write like this, because in his times it still wasn’t pronounced with long e).
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.
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).
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".
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.
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.
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.
> Yeah my impression was the Orthography is pretty consistent compared 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?
Yes. I think english is even slightly worth than french wrt spelling/sound mismatches, but you can call me biased. Moreover, William the Conqueror, who brought civilization to England, also brought the inconsistencies of the french spelling with him.
> I wonder: Why not spell check before you send?
Well, some of my coworkers don't either, from french to french. And up to recently in most programs it was a bother to switch back and forth between 2 languages.
But really, that's probably about common laziness; the typos you mention can be caught by proof-reading before sending, which can also catch other mistakes like missing words or inconsistent sentences caused rewrites.
Proof-reading just after writing is not the best tho, as you tend to skip words because it is "too fresh". I try to introduce some time gap between the too (for instance, proof-reading after lunch or the next morning).
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.
Like with a lot of things like this, if you learn for long enough the differences in the major approaches work themselves out.
In the last 10 years in Japan, more and more goverment documents are now available with furigana. Sometimes the edition is called "Friendly Japanese" (yasashii nihongo / やさしい日本語). The best explaination I can think of: There has been a dramatic rise in the number of non-university-educated foreign workers who have come to Japan on labor contracts -- factory workers, farm workers, hotel staff, shop staff, etc. They need to live their daily lives in Japan, but will struggle with native-level Japanese documents, so the gov't (both national and local) make an effort to reduce this friction. I expect the level of support from local gov'ts will be very much correlated to the number of foreign workers in their districts.
> *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.
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
The theory is based on the authors experience seeing Chinese and Korean students learn much, much faster than their western peers in Japanese language classes, coupled with an argument for "If you can read 50% of characters, you still can't read"
I'm surprised you've never come across this, as it is in the foreword.
> There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell you about their success using it.
I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)
Good for him. He was a strong student, but I wouldn't recommend it.
> I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)
But still impressive.
(To differentiate between the case where it's actually two vowels, you have to put an apostrophe inbetween; their example is 小唄 -> ko'uta.)
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.
I got the same behavior on macOS by using https://github.com/carjorvaz/macos-us-altgr-intl/blob/master...
big if true, jesus christ microsoft
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
"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)
(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.)
> 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.
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.
At some point you might as well use Roman characters the way the Cherokee alphabet does - which is to say, uses some of the shapes without paying attention to what sounds they made in English.
I'd expect that Spanish, German and French speakers would benefit just as much as English speakers from these changes.
Its not far off from the union of how all other European languages use the Roman alphabet, would be closer to accurate.
Additionally, being written in Roman alphabet doesn't neccessarily mean it's clear how to pronounce it. Hungarians calls their country "Magyarország", but unless you know Hungarian, you will be surprised with how it's pronounced. Same as "Chenonceaux", "Tekirdağ" or "Crkvina".
There is no way "every other language already uses the Roman alphabet."
Many languages are internally consistent in how they use it, but those that are aren't consistent with each other. And then there is English, which does pretty much everything any other language which uses the Roman alphabet does somewhere, and probably a few that none of the other extant languages normally using that alphabet do with it, on top.
Already done.
- Komen ça va? - Mo byin, mærsi.
We don't have anything against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole, do we?
Romanization is, by and large, a thing that exists for people who already know European/Western languages.
But it's a reality that English is the primary (if not sole) focus, for historical reasons and as the global lingua franca. English is taught (poorly, from what I hear) in schools, played on train announcements, is the only Western language available on ticket machines, and is the assumed language of non-Asian visitors to the country. I was even on a couple of domestic flights a few days ago and the captain / FAs made announcements in English. It is not "arbitrary" at all.
Use *h₂enǵʰ-ish please.
English is already heavily Norman-ized. Half of our vocabulary - including the word pronounce - comes from French.
Romanization is an approximation that exists primarily for two purposes: 1. to express Japanese terms in other languages and 2. to enable typing Japanese on a computer. It’s silly to enforce kunrei-shiki, a system rarely used in practice, in the name of "accuracy" based on arbitrary criteria. Romanized spellings will never be accurate for obvious reasons.
Given the purpose of romanization, it’s more practical to choose a system that allows non-Japanese speakers to pronounce words more closely aligned with the correct pronunciation.
Obviously, being more transparent to English-readers is also a reasonable goal a romanization system might have, and if that's your goal the Hepburn is a better system. I don't have a strong opinion about which system the Japanese government should treat as official, and realistically neither one is going to go away. But it's simply not the case that Hepburn is a better romanization scheme for every purpose.
This actually happened in Vietnam, and Korea comes close although they use the Hangul script, not the Latin alphabet.
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.
xi → hsi ji → chi ci → tz'u
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.
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.
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.
Here's the video that got me interested in Sato www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpFL08m5fQ&list=RDXYpFL08m5fQ&start_radio=1
つ is often seen as tu or tsu.
I have been in Japan for over a decade.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Long_cons...
There’s a surprising amount of interesting articles on wikipedia about that.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)#Spelling_re...
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.
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.
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.)
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".
[edit]
Wikipedia suggests it might be from Wāpuro rōmaji, where "u" is always used to spell the kana "う"
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.
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)
I have Real Real Japan on my YouTube algorithm. So, I’m a bit of an expert on this topic…
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
While driving there, you can pass a signs that say "LaLaLa Sun Beach" as well as "RaRaRa Sun Beach."
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...
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)?
This is going to make finding specific Japanese game roms even more annoying.
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.
Consider 彼氏彼女の事情[1]. The Japanese name is the same for the Manga and Anime, but the official names for the US localization of each are different (the manga went with a romanization of an abbreviation of the Japanese name Kare Kano while the Anime went with a translation of the full name His and Her Circumstances.
Needless to say, the official English translations didn't keep that title, going with "What are you doing at the end of the world? Are you busy? Will you save us?"
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.
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.
Is that an anti-China thing? Or is it a simplification thing?
I don't fully understand the underlying motivation.