Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by klodolph » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:23 AM UTC

japgolly wrote: post #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.

> Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.

I think the exception is people using the JSL textbooks :) there is a reasonable defense to using JSL. But you’re right. I think it’s indefensible to teach Hepburn to people interested in learning Japanese.

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

#22

Post by klodolph » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:25 AM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #17

archargelod wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 motivat…

Have you considered that different things are difficult for different people? Learning hiragana and katakana has taken me about a month, and I found it very difficult. There is no need to make it prerequisite for starting to learn grammar, forming sentences, or pronunciation.

If you want to learn pronunciation you should be listening to audio.

Sure, maybe don’t force people to learn kana first. But Hepburn is kind of the worst of all worlds, it is just a waste of time to learn Hepburn.

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

#23

Post by johnwalkr » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:25 AM UTC

kps wrote: post #8

motionlessveloc wrote: post #2

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.

Well the "native syllabary" is derived from Chinese characters, it's not something that was there and then Chinese characters were shoehorned in later.

I think at some early point most Japanese learners (that don't already know a Chinese language) think kanji should be dropped. And at a later point I think most would change their mind as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

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

#24

Post by archargelod » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:30 AM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #17

archargelod wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 motivat…

Have you considered that different things are difficult for different people? Learning hiragana and katakana has taken me about a month, and I found it very difficult. There is no need to make it prerequisite for starting to learn grammar, forming sentences, or pronunciation.

Notice how I didn't say that I "learned" both in a day, I "remembered" them. Of course actual learning will take some time, especially with less used characters. But remembering shapes and differentiating between them using mnemonics should not be too hard for most people.

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

#25

Post by stumulo_rob » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:31 AM UTC

AI slop aside, everybody seems to talk about romanization exclusively from the perspective of Japanese learners, while the biggest problem with Kunrei-shiki and Nihon-shiki is how they've been sabotaging Japanese people's ability to learn and pronounce English correctly. Hepburn is anglocentric and that makes perfect sense given how deeply embedded English is in modern Japanese.

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

#26

Post by yongjik » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC

fenomas wrote: post #18

kps wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Japanese as it currently exists is just really hard to read when written without kanji. A couple reasons: it has TONS of homophones, and it doesn't use spaces, and also it has lots of common words that are only 1 or 2 characters long. So if you're parsing a stream of kana, in the general case there will be several different ways to interpret the next couple characters and you'll constantly be backtracking. So at a mi…

Korean could serve as a point of comparison, as modern Korean is written mostly without Chinese characters (you could mix them in if you really want to, but approximately nobody bothers), but it does have spaces between words. And yes, when you have a highly inflecting language, "where do the spaces go" is a very nontrivial problem.

It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.

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

#27

Post by klodolph » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:41 AM UTC

archargelod wrote: post #14

japgolly wrote: post #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.

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 motivat…

The pair is something of a simplification, and romaji makes certain things in the language more obvious. Like the good old mat-u -> mat-anai, mat-imasu, mat-eru. Added the hyphen to make it clearer, but this hyphen splits a kana neatly in half. The stem is “mat” but you can’t write the stem using kana (in some sense of the word ‘stem’, maybe that’s not the correct word and there’s a different word for it, I’m not a linguist).

I’m not trying to say you should avoid kana, just that there is some amount of intuition you can develop with romaji that does not work in kana.

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

#28

Post by equinoxnemesis » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 2:50 AM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #27

archargelod wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 motivat…

The pair is something of a simplification, and romaji makes certain things in the language more obvious. Like the good old mat-u -> mat-anai, mat-imasu, mat-eru. Added the hyphen to make it clearer, but this hyphen splits a kana neatly in half. The stem is “mat” but you can’t write the stem using kana (in some sense of the word ‘stem’, maybe that’s not the correct word and there’s a different word for it, I’m not a l…

The traditional way to develop a similar intuition with a kana-only approach is to think of it as "moving across the row" in the kana table, which works fine. I think the fact that with romaji we can represent the stem as mat- is interesting and valuable in a theoretical sense but not all that useful to a learner.

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

#29

Post by hatthew » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:00 AM UTC

Maybe the subset of japanese content I'm exposed to is biased, but personally I encounter doubled vowels (obaasan) more often than macron vowels (obāsan). The latter is explicitly "modified hepburn romanization". Even if the latter is more common in general, it's worth noting that the former is the original. The article seems to say that the former is weird and nonstandard, which afaik is completely false.

Also, the particles はをへ aren't always romanized the way they're pronounced; I can think of several places I've seen を written as wo despite being used as a particle.

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

#30

Post by adrian_b » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:09 AM UTC

hatthew wrote: post #29

Maybe the subset of japanese content I'm exposed to is biased, but personally I encounter doubled vowels (obaasan) more often than macron vowels (obāsan). The latter is explicitly " modified hepburn romanization". Even if the latter is more common in general, it's worth noting that the former is the original. The article seems to say that the former is weird and nonstandard, which afaik is completely false. Also, the…

Using doubled vowels instead of diacritics is just one more concession to Americans, who are unfamiliar with the use of diacritics.

Hepburn is an inappropriate method of writing Japanese, which nonetheless has become the dominant way of writing Japanese, just because it caters to the inability of most Americans to learn how other languages than English are written and pronounced.