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Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet

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Re: Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet

#11
post #8

As someone intimately familiar with this topic, the article here is mostly correct but gets a lot of the small details wrong. Probably the most important missing part here is the reason non-Hepburn systems like Kunrei stuck around for so long: they were designed to replace the Japanese script completely. This sounds outlandish today, but they were invented during the early Meiji years when Japan was adopting Western…

What surprises me (only a little) is that Japan continues to use Chinese characters when they've got a perfectly good native syllabary.

I don't know if this is from the perspective of having learned Mandarin in elementary school first or if Japanese folks feel similarly, but reading words like, e.g., だいがくいんせい versus 大学院生 is actually a little more annoying because I have to scan more of the line to read the word in question. This is notwithstanding the effect that hiragana has in highlighting grammatical structures; it's a lot like setting off Finnish case endings and verb conjugations in a different color.

At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.

Re: Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet

#12
post #5

I'm surprised that articles like this that are pretty clearly AI-generated get any sort of traction here. Is it because people think the topic is interesting but don't actually care about the content? > Three Japanese words, three Hepburn transcriptions. The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like. I mean come on.

Detecting AI writing is a skill that not everyone has.

Re: Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet

#13
> Kunreisiki is also better for serious Japanese learners as it greatly simplifies the description of Japanese grammar: cf. matu/matte/matimasu (all with the same verb stem mat-) vs. Hepburn matsu/matte/machimasu (with 3 different verb stems)."

This is a silly argument because anyone learning Japanese is going to need to learn how to pronounce it anyway. Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.

Re: Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet

#14

> Kunreisiki is also better for serious Japanese learners as it greatly simplifies the description of Japanese grammar: cf. matu/matte/matimasu (all with the same verb stem mat-) vs. Hepburn matsu/matte/machimasu (with 3 different verb stems)." This is a silly argument because anyone learning Japanese is going to need to learn how to pronounce it anyway. Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.

Absolutely agree. Romaji was absolutely pointless for me and probably a detriment overall to learning a language. Japanese uses consonant + vowel pairs as a rule, and the faster you train your intuition for this, the better.

Remembering both Hiragana and Katakana took me no more than a day each. Although I have to admit that I already tried learning them around 5 years ago and gave up back then out of lack of motivation.

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