/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Hepburn is worse because it's similar enough to how it's actually pronounced that people think it's the same, baka desu sempai.

>>45970487
I feel like the only people who'd assume that would do even worse with kunrei.

>>45970487
it is if you're not an american though

Good riddance, I absolutely loathe kunrei

kunrei is only useful for typing, actual romaji must be hepburn

i will never stop writing timpo and mamco

>>45970487
It's the same if your first language is not English though

I barely know japanese but kunrei seems like bullshit

>>45977254
Sometimes using m instead of n is a feature of hepburn

>>45977835
It's actually easier for native to use kunrei and that's why they all use it, for example ち for a Japanese is t-sound+i-sound but when they say it it actually sounds like a chi but for them it's still ti. Writing chi for ち don't make sense for them, and it's the same for し s+i or つ t+u

>>45977892
american hands typed this

>>45977892
Anon...
The premise behind the whole discussion is because kunrei is flawed but standard...

>>45978039
the only problem with kunrei is with recent loanwords
that aside it has no downsides and it provides a closer representation to the way Japanese people normally write their language

Only pseudo intellectuals like the people on /djt/ who think Japanese is so sophisticated use kunrei. I can't explain the reason but trust me

both romanisation standards are retarded anyway
Why would you use “Y” for “J”? Why would you use the digraph “Ch” for the “tsh” sound? Latin script should be based on Latin, and not a corruption thereof. Why is there a digraph for t or ty- but not for hi or hy-, even if it also uses a different consonant? At least kunrei is slightly less retarded, and more consistent. “dyanai” makes far more sense than “janai”, and is just more etymologically informative.

>>45978207
>>45978125
>>45977892
Waiting for someone to explain what the fuck these posts mean

>>45978317
They mean "I studied japanese for three years and I want kunrei to stay because it makes me feel superior/I don't want to admit I wasted my time on it", basically.

>>45978333
I mean I guessed that it was some bullshit argument based on "Hepburn is foreign so it's le bad", but I expect bullshit arguments to at least make surface level sense.

>>45978317
I dream of having a big folder of such images

>>45978349
That's because kunrei doesn't really make sense in a modern age since for all intents and purposes it's not really made for fluent Japanese speakers. I've never once in my life read a single station sign that didn't use hepburn and the only time I ever see kunrei is when people insist on them in English translations or in game chats rarely.

>>45970279
Drop both and adopt IPA

>>45978349
kunrei represents Japanese logically, because /tſ/ /ts/ /ſ/ and /3/ were not actually distinct phonemes but allophones of /t/ /s/ /h/ before /i, j/ (or in the case of f /u/)
That aside it's not like it's a problem that they're changing, and yeah Hepburn is way better for modern Japanese with loanwords now establishing all of these sounds as independent

>>45979078
>because /tſ/ /ts/ /ſ/ and /3/ were not actually distinct phonemes but allophones of /t/ /s/ /h/ before /i, j/
I don't buy this, I've never heard tsu pronounced as tu before
Tunami? Maturi?

>>45979106
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZYqOpiNK18

>>45978317
>>45979106
Allophones are distinct pronunciations of what speakers of a language consider to all be the same sound. English T is aspirated (accompanied by a short H-like puff of air) at the start of a stressed syllable but not elsewhere. In Thai, these are separate consonants, but in English they aren't. T can be a glottal stop in American English in words like "button" and in some dialects of British English (better > be'uh, cat > ca'). Arabic treats the glottal stop as a distinct consonant, but English doesn't. Writer and rider even get the T and D merged into the same alveolar flap consonant somehow closer to the Japanese R than T, but Americans regard this as the same as T or D. In the same way, even if chi and tsu are clearly acoustically different than the consonant in ta, te, and to, Japanese speakers regard this as the same consonant. In the long run, it's possible English loanwords will cause CH and TS to become distinct phonemes in a similar way to how Chinese loanwords changed the phonology of Old Japanese.

>>45979106
I meant the opposite
The sequence /tu/ is realized in (Modern) Japanese as /tsu/, but /ts/ isn't an independent phoneme. It's an allophone of /t/ before /u/; by that I mean that every time that /u/ follows /t/, the pronunciation of /t/ is altered to /ts/. So it's irrelevant to write tsu, as tu already indicates the correct pronunciation.
Or at least it used to, but now there are words in Japanese, loanwords, where the sequence /tu/ is maintained.

>>45979849
It seems like a lot of semantics. Having an extra 'S' to better reflect the real pronunciation seems a better compromise than to try and cut down on 'unnecessary' letters for the sake of consistency. The whole point of hepburn is to be the 'English' spelling of Japanese anyway, and if you are serious enough to try and pronounce things 110% correctly you might as well just learn kata/hira and sidestep the whole debate entirely.
God forbid it end up like fr*nch. No one wants to have to deal with fr*nch.

>>45979841
Thanks for the nice explanation. I didn't know the term for it, but allophone is definitely a useful concept.
It makes me wonder how much of what you described relies on us having a written language. Do we only perceive a smaller subset of sounds because we know how the words are spelled? Would someone illiterate perceive different allophones as different sounds?

>>45979899
You're missing the point. Basically every people has sounds they can't easily tell apart, perhaps because the difference between the sounds does not carry meaning in their native language.
I don't know how true this is, but the claim seems to be that it's not obvious that the Japanese historically were able to hear that the 't' sound in front of 'u' or 'i' was any different from other 't' sounds, since they'd never encounter any context in which you'd need to distinguish ti or chi since only the latter occurs in Japanese. I dunno how true this is, though. Japanese people have certainly learned to distinguish the two these days, perhaps because they're exposed to foreign languages and loan-words.

More examples: Scandinavians may not distinguish the consonant 'y' and 'j', since their language lacks the hard 'j' sound. Germans may pronounce 'th' as 'z' because they think they sound the same. If speakers of these language had to transcribe English, they'd likely assign the same letter to the different sounds they can't distinguish.
This example is not even getting into the complications of surrounding sounds modifying how things are pronounced, which occurs in every language since some sounds are just very hard to make in sequence.

>>45979950
Even without writing it still happens. People generally have a difficult time even being able to hear the difference between them. Apparently babies can tell the difference between more sounds and start narrowing in on only hearing the differences between phonemes in their native language between 6-12 months, according to some studies anyway.

>>45979950
>Would someone illiterate perceive different allophones as different sounds?
No they wouldn't. Allophones are determined by the phonology of a language, not by its writing system. Languages that until recently had no writing system might have some pretty crazy patterns of allophony - see Kiribati where /t/ before /i/ is pronounced as /s/

>>45978317
Don't pay any attention to them they're just djtards whose brains have been rotted by youtube influencers larping as language teachers, they can't speak or understand a fucking lick of japanese

>>45977892
>Writing chi for ち don't make sense for them

>>45980884
It's not like it doesn't make sense. It very much does for them, I think that poster just worded it weirdly.
The point is that ti represents it just as well, and it shows better the relationship between ti ち ta た tu つ to と te て

>using romanji
あいしぎでぃぎ

>>45980936
>tu つ
If つ is tu, then what should トゥ be?

>>45981027
toᵘ

>>45981027
that's the thing, the sequence トゥ does not exist in native Japanese words or in Sino-Japanese vocabulary. That's because /t/ has an allophone /ts/ before /u/ in Japanese.
It's only with recent loanwords that a sequence /tu/ has appeared in Japanese that is different from /tsu/. Therefore, Hepburn is better for modern Japanese, which employs a lot of loanwords, but kunrei is still just as good in representing native words.

atisi...

They should invent an even more retarded system to replace it instead.

>>45970279
>people actually thought Hepburn could be dethroned
It's been the standard since 1867 and isn't full retard like the romanization of Mandarin is, it was always going to win out.

japanese ppl will never communicate in hepburn tho
this is relevant in games that dont support japanese which i guess may be a thing of the past at some point soon

>>45970279
I like Kunrei because it looks looks more Engrish

>>45970279
kunrei sounds like you're trying to pronounce with an indian accent

>>45970279
huh, i've never read ち as anything other than chi, i didnt even know that people spelled it as ti

>>45996718
I lived in japan for a few years and I honestly had no idea there were alternate forms of romanization other than hepburn.

The only good thing about kunrei is that it differentiates づ and ず, ぢ and じ.

>>45997493
NO, you will accept that kumrei is the only acceptable romanization and you will SAY IT

>>45980960
>romanji
You don't need to pretend

>>45999222
No, it doesn't. That's the main innovation compared to the older Nihon-shiki.

>>45999689
What do you mean "no, it doesn't"?

>>46000556
づ and ず are romanized the same (zu) on Kunrei-shiki

>>46000621
No, under kunrei づ is romanized as du.

>>45999222
Why is that good thing? They are phonetically identical, it just causes confusion.

>>46000621
>>46000734
Fuck me, I have been mixing kunrei-shiki and nihon-shiki all this time.
Fuck romaji. No one needs this shit anyway.

>>45970279
I dislike Kunrei because it looks looks more Engrish

>>45978333
TF are you on about? I studied JP and it's all Hepburn, even the native JP sensei use Hepburn when teaching us.

A simple fix should be to consider using a diacritic to distinguish the homophonous consonants like was done for the vowel ō/ou, which could then be of use to learned readers or natives.

>>46007679
Eeeeeewww no diacritics are definitely a horrible idea
They impair readability and just make text plain ugly. Japanese should consider itself blessed to have romanizations largely free of them, and it really doesn't need any diacritics at all

>>45978207
Because such diagraphs would then make things even more complicated and clunkier to read and write like mattsha, kandzi, kyudzitai, shindzitai, Shindzuku, Aitshi/Aidshi, Dshiba/Tshiba, etc.

>>46007691
Regardless such still doesn't disprove that it provides a solution to shortcomings of the alternative.

>>45979841
Paiboon for Thai is ingenious for employing the use of the diagraphs [dt]
and [bp] for voiceless/devoiced stop consonants, but one idea I feel has been overlooked is the employment of the letter Q to render devoiced /k/ as opposed to G or having render aspirated stops with the addition of H. In Semitic languages the equivalent of Q is often a uvular stop consonant which can be somewhat similar to a devoiced /k/. Lower case Q is also superficially similar to lower case G e.g. q/g, which could serve as a 'cue' for its desired pronunciation.

>>46002982
that's the reason I like it
an engrish every now and then can give you a laugh, you should be able to understand it or even read it in proper japanese anyway

>>46007805
There are no shortcomings at all, there is no need whatsoever to distinguish between two phonetically identical words, especially when it comes to things like road signs or other places where romanization is actually used. The point is a person who does not read or speak japanese can look at a sign for "Atsugi" and stand a reasonably good chance of saying the name correctly when (for example) asking for help from a non-english speaking railway worker. If they look and see "Atugi" they stand almost no chance. Ditto for all other kunrei vice hepburn romanizations.

Hepburn is borderline useless for reading actual japanese, but that has more to do with the fact that written japanese is a bastardized linguistic nightmare. If it were so easy to write japanese with a single script, japanese would have been reformed by now.

>>46012145
>Hepburn is borderline useless for
So there is a shortcoming. Regardless things should be applied in layers for different uses.

>>45970487
english native detected

>>45976589
Hepburn is gay because it's anglo centric.
Fuck anglos. Anglo centrism should not even factor in the equation when coming up with a romanization scheme, but what makes sense to the language and to the Japanese themselves. /ta/ /ti/ /tu/ /te/ /to/ are all the same phoneme to Japanese people.

>>45977892
It's not even the same way in every dialect.
Also the distinction between ti and chi isn't significant, since very single consonant plus i combinations is palatized in exact same manner (ri isn't ri, it's ryi, ki isn't ki, it's kyi, mi isn't mi, it's myi, etc.)

>>46020335
>Hepburn is gay because it's anglo centric.
You mean over half of the reason for its existence?

>>46020335
This. But I prefer the French-style romanisation they use in Vietnam (historically, Vietnam uses a Chinese character called Chu Nom).

DAIZILYOUBU

>>46020335
Half of katakana is just butchered english anon, you're fighting a lost battle.

>>46013082
it's a shortcoming of romanized japanese in general, not a flaw of hepburn specifically.

>>45970279
>It's officially over for kunrei
Haduki-tyan, my tinko can only get so hard!

>>45970279
whatever
for brazilian portuguese natives, hepburn was always the best way of romanization
english natives gtfo

>>46024022
Viado retardado mental
You know nothing of what you're talking about

>>45970279
i like kunrei more because some words take fewer inputs to make so it's a tiny bit faster to type

>>46020335
Man are you going to be disappointed when you learn how pervasive english loanwords are in modern japanese

>>45970279
Thank fucking god, I hate it so god damn much.

>>46039013
kunreisiki koso nihongo ni husawasii.
kuso gaizin domo ha sine

>>46024707
There's a world of difference between loan words and altering your language to be more "inclusive". Kunrei was already the beginning of the end, a soulless version of nihon-shiki that could no longer differentiate between じ and ぢ, or ず and づ.

The modern Japanese government are doing everything possible to destroy the country, and it's sad that there are no patriots still alive there. Miss my boy Yamaguti Otoya like you wouldn't believe.

>>46039185
Boy, you're going to be mad when you find out that hiragana and katakana are soulless versions of kanji.

>>46040035
Manyogana were honestly just a pain in the ass. I've got nothing against internal simplification of language over time, I just think it's sad to kowtow to western standards.

>>46040075
Romaji does not exist for Japan's benefit, aside from making it more likely a foreigner will pronounce a word they see on a sign close enough that a Japanese people will understand it.

>>46039185
Anon we're talking about a romanisation standard here, not the fucking second impact.
Neither standard is native, not even nihon-shiki, because natives wouldn't use a foreign alphabet for no reason. The whole point of romanisation is to allow easier reading for westerners.

Now this might come as a shock to you, but the whole reason Japan isn't a backwater archipelago that likes raw fish is because they became massive westaboos at the turn of the century. It's amazing how quickly they turned the country around, but they did turn the country around.
To be more western.
Specifically American.
Ramune bottles come from England.
Japanese whisky was brought over direct from Scotland.
The isolation period is over, and no one wants to go back to it apart from the handful of retards who will agree with anything so long as you frame it right.

>>46040075
>I've got nothing against internal simplification of language over time, I just think it's sad to kowtow to western standards.
Curious, how much hand-wringing by Japanese cultural socialites would be required for you to consider the adoption of something like pic-related "internal"?

Like how much of an effort by Japanese linguists and government that was not dependent on Korea beyond inventing Hangul, for the internal simplification to Hangul to be of an unmistakably Japanese quality?
Or at least as Japanese as Chinese characters.

>>46040222
>The whole point of romanisation is to allow easier reading for westerners.
So explain pinyin.

>>46040275
What does hangul have to do with anything?

Vanguard, Stronghold Strategist, Motivational Leader, Mining/Logging Foreman?

>>46042444
That's for chinese anon.
I learned a good bit of chinese, and it's how you learn chinese.
I guess it's also handy for teaching kids how to pronounce the characters, however that means teaching the latin alphabet to them first, which seems redundant.
But that argument misses the point, that being it's entirely for chinese and not japanese.

>>46043809
What difference does it make? The romanization of Chinese has nothing in common with English phonics and it's still used for foreigners to read. Why is it good for China to use a romanization system that suits Chinese logic, but Japan has to cuck out to the West because reasons?

>>46043861
What are you talking about
It's totally based around the English set of phonemes. They use J for /dg/ all the time.
It was also pretty intuitive when I learned it.
There's a few diacritics but those are for tones and there is no way around them. No alphabet could communicate tone without them.

>>46044041
What's intuitive about cixi being read "tsushi"

>>46044210
or si being read "soo".

>>46044220
>>46044210
Everything when you have the tone mark.
Bearing in mind everything looks weird when you write it phonetically. Dumbass.

>>46039185
>altering your language to be more "inclusive"
What are you talking about? You're not japanese. Go touch grass.

ᚠᚢᚳᚳᛁᚾ ᛫ ᚱᚩᛗᚪᚾᛋ ᛫ ᛗᚫᚾ

>>46044220
That's more like a strange sz sound, there's not even real vowel in some people's pronunciations. When it is a vowel it's usually /ɨ/, so I could see it being similar enough to Japanese す or some English dialects with a fronted /u/ pronunciation to register as "soo".
A few older romanizations like Latinxua Sinwenz just outright don't use a vowel and Yale Romanization uses jr, chr, shr, dz, tsz, sz for zhi, chi, shi, zi, ci, si.

>>46020335
Nigga, have you listned to Japanese people speak in AD 2024? Every second word is Engrish

>>46039025
>t.

>>46043861
>but Japan has to cuck out to the West because reasons?
Romaji is meant for foreigners. Japanese people don't use it when talking to each other, except in rare occasions like a singer adopting a romanized stage name or using it for comedic effect.

>>46044966
Again, neither does Mandarin.

>>46044975
Nice non-sequiter there.
And thinking China didn't cuck out to the west once they realised how shitty their country was is laughable.

>>46045091
>pinyin is mainly for foreigners to read
>they still right their shit like empress cixi
As if any clueless Westerner is ever going to pronounce that remotely correctly. If China doesn't need to give a fuck about Western faggots convenience, neither does Japan.

>>46045192
Weird, that's a fake quote.
If two chinese people wanted to talk to another, they'd do so in get this: Chinese.

>>46044975
So? What do the chinks have to do with this?

>>46045214
The point is romanization schemes don't need to be based on English phonics whether or not they are mainly used by foreigners. The pro hepburn cucks' argument is that if ignorant White people see otintin and kanzi, they won't know how to read it. Well ignorant white people don't know how to read cixi or hanzi correctly just from looking at it either.

>>46045192
Who are you quoting

>>46045461
>The point is romanization schemes don't need to be based on English phonics whether or not they are mainly used by foreigners.
They don't NEED to be, but it makes more sense from them to be.

>>45970279
Kunrei (especially the modified kuñrei) is just there for grammatical and linguistical purposes.

Even Scientists normally just use Hepburn, because when you write a Japanese word, you want to know how it sounds and not how the morphosyntactical usage of the word is.
Kunrei is literally just following the grammatical logic.

If I would write to you "#Tanaka.sañ o.genki=des.u=ka?#", you would most likely look like I'm transcribing a different language.
It's much easier to just write "Tanka-san ogenki desu ka?", because if you aren't into Japanese lingustics, you only understand the gaijinburn writing anyway.

>>46045461
Actually, it's pretty damn easy. Pinyin is about as close to how you'd write mandarin in english as you can get. It takes like five minutes to get a chinese accent down.
But no no, because the phonemes are not identical, they're totally different and make no sense whatsoever. Nevermind the fact that you're not even actually using pinyin since you haven't even done the ghetto thing where you give the tone for that word as a literal number, and that you're probably doing this to obfuscate the fact that your argument makes no fucking sense, because it isn't actually english it's totally unlike how you'd romanize mandarin into the latin alphabet using english as a reference. Not like that's what we're discussing, not at all.

>>46052516
Romanizing し as shi is entirely from English. In Polish, it would be written szi, in Irish, it would be written si, in French, it would be written chi. The Chinese pinyin romanization scheme doesn't follow English at all. No anglo would look at the letter c and read it like 'ts' is read in English, for instance. So yeah, you're full of shit. Japan should have some national pride and tell gaizin, especially anglos, to go get fucked and stay in their own shithole countries they allowed to be flooded with nogs and pakis rather than mangle the Japanese language just to accommodate anglos.

>>46053035
You should stop being angry at other people's behalf. That's something twitter users do.
By the way, any kind of romanization would be "bowing down" to westerners, since that alphabet is not native to Japan and they don't know what the syllables sound like in different languages.
You should leave your PC and go outside every once in a while.

>>46053035
>one country does what it wants
This is fine.
>another country does what it wants
No, you should have some kind of national pride that prevents you from this thing that doesn't matter.

>>46053035
I'm sorry, it follows it pretty damn well all things considered.
Any other language wouldn't even have C make anything but a /k/ sound, apart from french.
What I'm getting at is not that it's a 1:1 "Get an englishman to write down what he hears from a chinese speaker", it's using english as a base to leap off from. It makes perfect sense if you follow S>C>Z.
Oh, and they use "Sh" all the time, so by your own logic it's based on English. Way to go buddy. Really showed us all how pinyin of all fucking things is based in wonderland where any letter can make any sound if you believe hard enough, and japan is so retarded for using it's most important foreign influence to romanize from.
In fact, the nobel prize is coming in your mail to congratulate you on this big new discovery.

>>46053035
>romanizing し as shi would only be done in english!
Okay. If Poland wanted to slavokize it to be szi, then go ahead and let them. I'm sure the JP->PL translators will be thrilled.
Same for france or whatever. Romanizing is done for the english audience.
Because US is the successor to Rome.

>>46020335
English site
English board
English service

>>46053035
>No anglo would look at the letter c and read it like 'ts' is read in English, for instance
american here, it's pretty intuitive if you know anything about slavic latin alphabets