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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

The author is using an anglicised romaji system and evidently thinking in English, so they think writing 話します as "hanasimasu" is "wrong".

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I feel like you’re going out of your way to misinterpret the article. As the article says below:

> this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.

Then the article includes an exercise that verifies the reader’s understanding.

I also included a note:

> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)

Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji, therefore it’s invalid.

"Factual mistake" is a bit harsh, but the missing piece is that there are multiple ways to romanise Japanese; all of them produce "valid Romaji" but only in the particular system being used. Si is how you write し in romaji using the kunrei-shiki romanisation. In the Hepburn romanisation it's shi. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#Diffe... .

Kunrei has been deprecated, Hepburn is the official one even the government of Japan recommends these days and matches better the pronunciation of the language.

But nobody cares about formal romanization rules in the first place. People have informal bastardizations of Hepburn that's consistent enough for typing, and Kunrei deprecation is more or less just admission of the status quo.

Most people use hepburn these days, it's people who learned japanese 20 years ago or so who are still stuck with kunrei.

I see, maybe my use of “romaji” is sloppy because I implied “Hepburn romaji” specifically because that’s what I chose in the article. I do explicitly mention that other romanizations exist and that I chose not to use them — so I’m not worried about misleading someone who reads the article. But on pedantic level I see why “si doesn’t exist” sounds overly broad.

I think also that anyone who's spoken Japanese for a while already has internalized that "si" === "shi" because there literally isn't the sound "si" in modern Japanese, as the other commenters mentioned it's often romanized both as "si" and "shi" in daily life, if you typed "si" into a keyboard it renders し, it goes on. The original comment on this thread includes one such person who literally didn't follow why "si" is wrong, and I felt the same way too as a long-time Japanese learner. It's a very "copy paste Western language concepts onto Japanese" way of conceptualizing the language, which is IMO a great way to set oneself up for great struggles when trying to learn a language that is structurally different, because it's not the right mental model.

I’d normally be with you and I call this out as a concern purists would have my article. I’m doing something differently here and maybe more daring — the conceit of this article is that you can learn the entire system in one evening with no prior knowledge of Japanese at all. In that case I think the “s_ + i = shi” is as fine a pedagogical moment as any to introduce why the hiragana table matters. And for readers who already know it, I assume they won’t actually have a problem following the content, setting aside the pedantism and the annoyance at someone seemingly “teaching in English” and “copypasting concepts”. Like I get what you’re saying, I just think that it’s okay to break the rules for what I’m going for here.

This is pedantic but you're thinking of "romanization", the act of transliterating Japanese with the Roman alphabet (romaji). There are different systems of romanization, most notably Hepburn and Kunrei. In Hepburn shi is correct, in Kunrei si is correct.

It sounds like you're saying "si" are not valid characters in the Roman alphabet.

Ok yea I see what you’re getting at — my terminology was overly narrow. By “romaji” I specially meant “romanization I’ve chosen for this article”. I do offer an explicit note that other romanizations exist, but outside of that note, I tried to stay within a single self-consistent system, so this nuance was lost.

> I feel like you’re going out of your way to misinterpret the article.

Nope. You correct yourself after, sure, but what I wrote is how it came across at the time when reading.

> Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji

No, that's not what "romaji" means. If you mean Hepburn, say Hepburn. And if you don't know the difference, that's a sign to learn more before presuming to teach others.

I’ve already conceded in sibling comments that saying “romaji” to mean “Hepburn romaji” specifically is technically imprecise. Note I still do explicitly mention other romanization systems, want to stay consistent within the article, and don’t want to overload the reader with terminology. My motivation here is that realistically that’s the romaji you’re going to be exposed to the most as a learner. At least that’s been my experience.

As for “correcting” myself, yes, I expect the reader invested in arguing online to also be able to follow more than a single paragraph of text. I think it’s fine that you stumbled there as that paragraph wasn’t for you. I don’t think I’ve hurt your understanding of Japanese this way.

The only people confused by that paragraph are people who already learned kana or correct pronunciation (or both). That paragraph isn’t for them.

> I’ve already conceded in sibling comments that saying “romaji” to mean “Hepburn romaji” specifically is technically imprecise. Note I still do explicitly mention other romanization systems, want to stay consistent within the article, and don’t want to overload the reader with terminology. My motivation here is that realistically that’s the romaji you’re going to be exposed to the most as a learner.

It's not just a technicality. "i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji" is not just sloppy but outright misleading, as though "si" and "tu" were somehow not romaji.

Again, it's my mistake in terminology. I'll fix it. It has no bearing on the actual conjugation procedure that the article tries to teach.

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