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motionlessveloc 24 hours ago [-]
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 innovations and abandoning ancient traditions at breakneck speed. And because their target was thus Japanese people, not foreigners, they didn't need to worry about English phonology.
Incidentally, the Chinese pinyin system was also designed to replace Chinese writing, and Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution. Which also explains why it uses letters like x, c and q in ways that English readers find wildly unintuitive.
canjobear 23 hours ago [-]
> Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution
This was indeed the Communists’ original plan, but the real story is more interesting. Before taking over the country the plan was to replace characters with a pinyin-like system Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] and a whole generation in the north was taught to read this. After 1949, Mao was talked out of Romanization by none other than Stalin, who told him the Chinese language deserves its own script. Pinyin was designed after that, officially as a teaching tool, but probably by people who secretly still believed in more radical writing reform.
It is remarkable that some countries actually have switched writing systems in modern times. Turkey did it in the 1920s after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, for example (replaces an Arabic alphabet with a Roman one).
jhbadger 21 hours ago [-]
Not to mention numerous ex-Soviet countries have replaced their Cyrillic system for Latin ones to demonstrate their independence from Russian colonialism.
Lumich 12 hours ago [-]
I'm wondering what script the North American Indians† would have replaced the one given to them by their English-speaking colonizers with had they been given any in the first place and not been all but exterminated instead.
Well, anyway … “evil Russians colonialists”.
† I know the PC term in North America is “first nations” or some such but for those outside NA using the old term is perfectly fine.
motionlessveloc 14 hours ago [-]
And many of those Cyrillic systems had in turn replaced previous Arabic/Persian-based writing systems.
pmcarlton 22 hours ago [-]
Yes, several things are just wrong here, e.g.
"…久保 becomes "Kubo" without the long vowel marked at all…" -- there is no long vowel! Just plain Kubo is correct.
"Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki optimize for a systematic, one-to-one mapping between kana and romanization. One kana, one romanization, always, with no exceptions."
(Kunrei-shiki: exceptions! 猫は庭へ魚を運ぶ Neko wa niwa e sakana o hakobu)
Also: "Romanization is a scaffold, not a destination." ? I TOO AM A HUMAN WRITER WHO WRITES WITH MY OWN FINGERS.
But the history of the Romaji movement is indeed interesting - there were influential people who were quite serious about moving entirely to romaji at one point! It would have changed everything.
flufluflufluffy 21 hours ago [-]
If any aspiring Japanese learners read this, forget this article. Just start learning hiragana/katakana from the get-go. You’re going to have to eventually, assuming you want read anything (and anything worth reading certainly won’t be written in romaji). But beyond that, you want to start breaking down your instinctual pronunciations and biases that appear when reading letters you know, so that you can more accurately and efficiently learn the correct pronunciations.
danabramov 21 hours ago [-]
This is unnecessarily pedantic advice, and I encourage fellow learners of Japanese to ignore it. You will definitely need to learn hiragana and katakana but you can do it at your own pace, and it is orthogonal to learning the basics of grammar, forming sentences, and pronunciation, so you definitely don't need to think of it as an obstacle. For pronunciation in particular, obviously watching Japanese movies etc helps. And yes, I have a native Japanese teacher who recommends the same.
rkido 23 hours ago [-]
Minor correction on the article: Kunrei-shiki doesn't have a 1-to-1 mapping between kana and letters. You can see that directly in the table they show. Only Nihon-shiki does. Kunrei-shiki is the worst of both worlds.
That's why Nihon-shiki is and will likely always remain the best system for serious students of Japanese - if you even need it at all. But then again, if you're just starting out, the best place to start is usually to immediately start learning kana.
japgolly 22 hours ago [-]
> 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.
archargelod 21 hours ago [-]
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.
klodolph 20 hours ago [-]
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.
equinoxnemesis 20 hours ago [-]
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.
klodolph 19 hours ago [-]
I have trouble comprehending the idea that this is only interesting in a theoretical sense but not all that useful to a learner. Could you give me something additional here? I’m not trying to be a dick here but my first reaction is “that’s just nuts” and I want to know what I’m missing.
equinoxnemesis 19 hours ago [-]
The reason I say it's not useful (as opposed to merely interesting) to a learner is that I think if you're ever explicitly forming a structure like "mat-" in your head while thinking about how to say something or how to interpret something in Japanese, you are doing something quite unnatural, since that form cannot actually be expressed in the language. A fluent or native speaker knows that, eg. to make "matsu" a polite order, the tsu (tu) becomes chi (ti) and then you add nasai; they are not thinking about the isolated 't' consonant (which in this example is not actually even the same consonant - and native speakers know that, considering they distinguish ティ in loanwords!).
As for why it's interesting and useful theoretically - well, Japanese is of course older than the kana chart, and if you're doing diachronic linguistics I think taking mat- to be the stem is probably a useful frame to think about the origins of the modern conjugation paradigm.
klodolph 18 hours ago [-]
> you are doing something quite unnatural
It is equally unnatural to form kana in your head when thinking about how to say something! Or, it’s unnatural to think about whether a verb is godan or ichidan when speaking, it’s unnatural to think about what particles are, etc.
You get an explanation for a concept and you internalize it. The explanation is a framework for you to internalize the concept, and once the concept is internalized, you no longer need it. The explanations are still useful, like romaji is still useful. None of the explanations are necessary, some are useful.
Maybe you get a few different partially wrong explanations of what the “wa” particle means before you internalize it. You’re not getting damaged by those explanations, they’re Wittgenstein’s ladder. (Well, maybe you got some bad explanations, but even the good explanations are wrong.)
You throw a bunch of different explanations at different students, combine it with practice and lots of examples, and eventually it sticks.
> which in this example is not actually even the same consonant
By that standard, the “t” in “butter” is not the same consonant as the “t” in “tap” (try it!)
People are really good at understanding and learning phonology and can really internalize it and understand it on an intuitive level, even if they can’t explain the rules for it. If you’re a native English speaker, you accept that there’s a “t” in “butter” and a “t” in “tap” even though they are not the same sounds (phones). That’s because they are the same phonemes.
Romaji is an effective way of writing down Japanese phonemes.
wk_end 19 hours ago [-]
You don’t need to visually split the consonant apart as a separate character to recognize the relationship between か/き/く/け/こ - after all, the Japanese manage to do it without Latin letters. It adds very little to do so except as a crutch to let a learner continue to think using their native orthography, which only impedes learning. And given what a small hurdle it is, especially compared to the multitude of enormous hurdles the language has in store for you, you’re better off just jumping over it and moving on to those more interesting ones.
klodolph 18 hours ago [-]
I don’t want to be argumentative here, but,
- “Need to” is a very different criterion from “is useful”, and “visually split” is, well, kind of unexpected to me!
- The comparison to native Japanese speakers seems especially irrelevant here,
- You’re not using your native orthography here, you’re using romaji, I don’t think it’s anyone’s native orthography.
- You probably want to use the Romaji heavily anyway, because that’s how most people will use computers.
When you’re learning a language you naturally multiple approaches to understanding a single topic. You’ll see a word written, you’ll hear it. You’ll hear a sentence and then someone will give you an explanation of the grammar, and you’ll compare that with your notes. It’s multimodal and all of these different modes are useful.
Like how romaji is useful for understanding conjugations. Obviously not necessary, just useful.
danabramov 21 hours ago [-]
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.
klodolph 21 hours ago [-]
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.
archargelod 20 hours ago [-]
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.
21 hours ago [-]
klodolph 21 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kps 22 hours ago [-]
What surprises me (only a little) is that Japan continues to use Chinese characters when they've got a perfectly good native syllabary.
nrr 22 hours ago [-]
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.
fenomas 21 hours ago [-]
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 minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
adrian_b 20 hours ago [-]
Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning.
This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia.
The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on.
The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
fenomas 19 hours ago [-]
Sure - it's probably safe to say that any language can he written in any writing system, if one is willing to change both the language and the writing system :)
yongjik 20 hours ago [-]
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.
T-R 18 hours ago [-]
A lot of material for younger readers uses similar spacing to Korean, like the Pokemon games. It works well enough when you know the vocabulary being used is limited, but even there it gets frustrating.
When you're reading, you're trying to identify a substring and map it back to the unit of meaning, which is effectively the kanji. That works seamlessly with Hangul, because it mostly blocks (as syllables) the same way as kanji, and, as you mentioned, the extra vowels and silent consonants provide more disambiguation. With kana, the length you have to scan to read, and then guess at (using only context to disambiguate), a root word, is a lot more arbitrary.
Mechanically kana is just less compressed, less aligned, and makes it harder to visually identify/scan for units of meaning. Obviously Korean shows that you can make different tradeoffs, but for Japanese losing the kanji would probably necessitate reworking Kana as well - and unless the pronunciation changed, it would probably need to be in a way that represents the pitch accent, which is a modifier on the whole syllable, rather than just a few extra consonants or vowels.
fenomas 18 hours ago [-]
Agreed, I think that's a close analogy and it's wild to me how recently Korean dropped kanji. But I imagine having a lot more vowel sounds made it a lot easier. I've wondered whether the two interacted - e.g. if there were word pairs that had previously used the same vowel sounds, but changed after the switch to Hangul to be distinguishable. Do you know by any chance?
yongjik 16 hours ago [-]
Sino-Korean words are different from Sino-Japanese words in that the sounds are very "rigid": most Chinese characters have one canonical sound, and it is pronounced that way regardless of where it appears (modulo some mostly predictable sound change rules). So, you can't just take a Sino-Korean word and "tweak" its sound to disambiguate - when such a word changes its sound it will no longer be perceived as Sino-Korean at all, which actually happened for some examples such as 산행 (san-haeng, 山行, "mountain + go" = "hike on a mountain") which gave birth to 사냥 (sanyang, "hunting"), a separate word.
What did happen was that we lost obscure words that could only be understood by looking at Chinese characters (because they're used so rarely, or because they sound the same as another more common word) - you could still use them if you wanted to, but unless you also write them in Hanja, it would be confusing, and if you mix gratuitous Hanja into your writing just because you like those words, most young readers will find it pretentious, and I fear, mostly unreadable.
I can't say we lost much by losing these words. Rather, I think it actually forced writers to select less ambiguous words, which is usually a good thing.
(Also, these days most Koreans know much more English than Classical Chinese, so English loanwords can sometimes fill the gap. It helps that most English (or other Western) loanwords sound different from native or Sino-Korean words, so there's less chance of collision.)
rf15 19 hours ago [-]
> it has TONS of homophones
I never get this line of reasoning - so are people listening to spoken japanese just in a perpetual state of confusion because they can't see the associated intended Kanji?
Also this coming from a person on a platform who's primary language is commonly pronounced with the last syllable/letter of each word used to start the next one.
The engli shlanguage ha sit sown nonsense.
T-R 19 hours ago [-]
Spoken Japanese uses pitch accent to distinguish homophones
fenomas 17 hours ago [-]
In some cases, but note that (a) this is only true for a tiny handful of homophones, and (b) the distinguishing accent varies by region.
E.g. "hashi" famously can mean bridge/edge/chopsticks depending on accent, but which accent has which meaning is different in Tokyo vs Osaka.
19 hours ago [-]
rf15 19 hours ago [-]
So shouldn't the better solution be a few more pronounciation markers beyond two strokes, a circle and tiny letters instead of thousands of chinese characters?
T-R 17 hours ago [-]
But who is this solution for? Unless you change the pronunciation of the language, it would be adding markers around whole syllables to disambiguate - syllables that represent the kanji they came from (many of which already have phoentic components) - but those syllables would still be less dense and visually identifiable than kanji is for someone who already speaks the language.
It's similar to initialisms or emoji in English; it's of course frustrating for people who don't know them, and there are reasonable complaints about some of the extremes, but speakers/writers use them because they find them useful when communicating with an audience that's also assumed to know them.
fenomas 19 hours ago [-]
I mean, do you want to know or are you venting? If the former: No, spoken Japanese is not constantly confusing, because (a) some words are distinguished by intonation, (b) Japanese speakers know what the homophones are, and either avoid them while speaking, establish the context before saying them, say extra words to clarify which word they mean, etc.
Kind of humorously, groups sometimes develop lingo to avoid all this. E.g. the JP words for science and chemistry both have the standard pronunciation "kagaku", so people in industries where both terms are used often use nonstandard pronunciations (bakegaku for chemistry).
Also the homophones thing is probably lesser of the things I mentioned. A typical sentence might only have 1 or 2 overloaded words, but it will have lots of substrings that can be parsed multiple ways.
kazinator 17 hours ago [-]
Firstly, the native syllabary uses conventions that give rise to ambiguities. For instance えい (ei) can encode a long e sound like in "sensei" (teacher) or a separate e and i, like in "deiriguchi" (combined exit and entrance).
Secondly, there are many homonyms: words written with completely different kanji that sound exactly the same, very similar (e.g. same modulo pitch accent) or use the same spelling in kana.
Here are two words that don't sound the same at all. Let's use Hepburn, because it distinguishes them: kõri and kouri. One has a long o, the other has separate o and u. In hiragana, both are written こうり: exactly the same. kōri might be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) or 高利 (high interest rate). kouri is 小売 (retail, lit. "little selling").
If you're having a conversation with someone and don't know which "kõri" they are talking about, high interest rate or axiom, you can ask. But you cannot just ask a written text. You have to work it out from context.
Kanji eliminate the ambiguity, vastly simplifying reading. Reading Japanese that has been normalized to kana is murder. Especially if spaces are not introduced to mark word divisions. That is only done in hiragana books for small children!
Sometimes this happens in writing. A sentence happens to start with a couple of words that happen to be usually written in hiragana, with some particles after them, and you're left with a puzzle just working out where the word boundaries are. This requires backtracking in the general case; there is no principle like longest match.
loicd 15 hours ago [-]
I don't deny that reading Japanese written in kana alone is currently more painful than with kanji. However, it seems to me that the current writing system is a local optimum and not a global one. If people started writing Japanese using kana alone, some adjustments would eventually be made to make it more readable, and the end result would in my opinion be superior to the current kana/kanji combination. The same thing happened with the latin alphabet. We don't use it the same way the romans used it 2000 years ago: we introduced minuscule letters, spacing, punctuation, accents... At the end of the day, Japanese is a spoken language like all other languages, and there are no reasons why a purely phonetic system should not work for writing it.
kazinator 9 hours ago [-]
In a Japanese dictionary, you can find homonym clusters as long as something like 12 words.
Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to kanji regarding which word they mean. Except they don't write down the kanji; they think of a very common word which has that kanji and say things like, "the shō syllable in my word is the same (kanji) as in shōrai".
The vast majority of the Japanese vocabulary consists of word roots made from the combination of two kanji. The language-making itself is not separable from kanji.
Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
loicd 7 hours ago [-]
> Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
I seriously doubt that. Literacy levels rose in Japan during the Meiji era and that produced pressure towards simplification of the writing system. Sure, Japan didn't go all the way to a pure kana system or to a latin-derived script, but the reasons are political and cultural (and there is nothing wrong with that) rather than linguistic.
In any cases, you didn't disprove my point, which is that the need for kanji is self-fulfilling. It feels necessary, precisely because its usage prevents the evolution of the phonetic kana system into something useful.
kazinator 6 hours ago [-]
> need for kanji is self-fulfilling
Well, yes? The language is built on kanji. In a 100,000 word dictionary, the vast amount of content is words that someone made up by putting together kanji. It is kanji-first. None of it makes sense when you strip away the kanji, and formation of new words is blocked. Kanji is a cultural cornerstone.
Before literacy, commoners had 5000 word vocabularies cradle to grave. Anything beyond that was the domain of the erudite elite.
> the phonetic kana system
The kana system is quasi-phonetic. It doesn't capture phonetics accurately, like IPA, and has ambiguities of its own.
But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics!
Sure, you can fix all this if you just change Japanese into another language.
notrustincloud 5 hours ago [-]
Lol. Flashback to me having this exact conversation with a new Gaijin-kun アメリカの人 at about his second or third month in Tohoku...32 years ago. "They could just do it all in Romaji and save so much work."
and even today some of my Japanese friends joke with me about how hard 漢字 can be, they laugh because they know its hard for them and admit they wouldnt do it if they had been born anywhere else.
So, it is absolutely baked in and kanji first. without kanji the following tongue twister is indecipherable.
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.
kazinator 17 hours ago [-]
> The principle comes with a trade-off. Hepburn is phonetic for English speakers, not systematic for kana.
While that is true, the kana themselves are not fully systematic for capturing Japanese. Hepburn can capture features that kana do not!
How about this set of examples, which shows both an advantage and drawback of Hepburn.
The hiragana sequence こうり (ko-u-ri) could be several things. one is 小売 (retail) where the division is こ・うり. Or it could be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) where the dividion is こう・り. Here the う in こう is no longer u but a vowel lengthening mark.
Hepburn spells these words differnetly: kouri and kōri.
Now, within this same example cluster we ecounter this: the word for ice is こおり （ko-o-ri). Unfortunately, Hepburn has this as kõri, creating an ambiguity not found in kana.
A modification to Hepburn allowing (or rather requiring) the spelling koori would resolve that.
lyall 23 hours ago [-]
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.
refactor_master 22 hours ago [-]
> The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like
So… letters?
japgolly 22 hours ago [-]
Detecting AI writing is a skill that not everyone has.
hatthew 20 hours ago [-]
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.
adrian_b 20 hours ago [-]
Using doubled vowels instead of diacritics is just one more concession to Americans, who are unfamiliar with the use of diacritics and whose software frequently does not work correctly when text contains characters with 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.
hatthew 17 hours ago [-]
Ok?
timcobb 19 hours ago [-]
This is interesting but as always these days the slop effect just makes it feel like I'm reading Claude which sucks too much and makes me not want to read this.
Add to that that this is content marketing, and the whole thing really collapses. I'll consume interesting content marketing, I may even consume interesting slop, but I can't consume slop content marketing.
stumulo_rob 20 hours ago [-]
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.
adrian_b 19 hours ago [-]
Both Hepburn and the fact that English is deeply embedded in modern Japanese make sense only because USA has won the War (which is a good thing otherwise, but some of its effects on Japanese are less desirable).
Besides this historical motivation, there exists no technical argument in favor of any of them.
I do not agree at all that Nihon-shiki can sabotage the ability of Japanese people to learn and pronounce English.
Except for the native English speakers, all the other people of the World who are familiar with other languages besides their own are also familiar with the fact that every language has its own system of writing and pronunciation, whose rules you must learn, including the alphabet variations.
It is the dominance of English in the international relations after WWII which sabotages the ability of most native English speakers to learn other languages, especially to learn how they are pronounced, so in foreign countries the native English speakers usually stand out much more than the native speakers of any other languages, because of their pronunciation, which is found funny by the locals.
Making the rules for writing your own language more complex for your own country and for most other countries of the World, just to make them simpler for the citizens of a certain privileged country, is not a behavior that I can approve, because I find it too subservient.
stumulo_rob 15 hours ago [-]
Incredibly arrogant/racist take that reduces Japanese people to passive recipients of Western influence as if they had no agency of their own for more than half a century.
Lumich 14 hours ago [-]
Incredibly stupid and misleading comment of yours, slily insinuating Adrian has taken an "arrogant/racist" attitude towards the Japanese, when in fact not the slightest trace of such an attitude can be found in his comment.
Rather, he (rightfully) criticized the generally negative effect caused by the deployment of anglocentric teaching methods (exclusively for the convenience of the Anglo world).
In addition, he observed a negative feedback of such strategems on the Anglo world itself, in as much as it forms an "impediment by convenience" for them to learn about other cultures (and thus rise a bit on the scale of human development).
So in a way what he said is the opposite of what you claim he did. Might that have been what triggered your inadequate reaction?
As for "arrogance", you stated that Kunrei/Nihon have been "sabotaging Japanese people's ability to learn and pronounce English correctly", as if there was any value in that for a civilization that culturally stands much higher than, say, the USA.
And as for "racism", it is well known that was an important factor on the "no prisoners" approach the US took against Japan, and also in terroristically and sadistically napalming one city after another (then repeated in Korea and Vietnam).
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 innovations and abandoning ancient traditions at breakneck speed. And because their target was thus Japanese people, not foreigners, they didn't need to worry about English phonology.
Incidentally, the Chinese pinyin system was also designed to replace Chinese writing, and Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution. Which also explains why it uses letters like x, c and q in ways that English readers find wildly unintuitive.
This was indeed the Communists’ original plan, but the real story is more interesting. Before taking over the country the plan was to replace characters with a pinyin-like system Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] and a whole generation in the north was taught to read this. After 1949, Mao was talked out of Romanization by none other than Stalin, who told him the Chinese language deserves its own script. Pinyin was designed after that, officially as a teaching tool, but probably by people who secretly still believed in more radical writing reform.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinxua_Sin_Wenz
https://archive.org/details/chineselanguagef0000defr/
Well, anyway … “evil Russians colonialists”.
† I know the PC term in North America is “first nations” or some such but for those outside NA using the old term is perfectly fine.
"…久保 becomes "Kubo" without the long vowel marked at all…" -- there is no long vowel! Just plain Kubo is correct.
"Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki optimize for a systematic, one-to-one mapping between kana and romanization. One kana, one romanization, always, with no exceptions." (Kunrei-shiki: exceptions! 猫は庭へ魚を運ぶ Neko wa niwa e sakana o hakobu)
Also: "Romanization is a scaffold, not a destination." ? I TOO AM A HUMAN WRITER WHO WRITES WITH MY OWN FINGERS.
But the history of the Romaji movement is indeed interesting - there were influential people who were quite serious about moving entirely to romaji at one point! It would have changed everything.
That's why Nihon-shiki is and will likely always remain the best system for serious students of Japanese - if you even need it at all. But then again, if you're just starting out, the best place to start is usually to immediately start learning kana.
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.
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.
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.
As for why it's interesting and useful theoretically - well, Japanese is of course older than the kana chart, and if you're doing diachronic linguistics I think taking mat- to be the stem is probably a useful frame to think about the origins of the modern conjugation paradigm.
It is equally unnatural to form kana in your head when thinking about how to say something! Or, it’s unnatural to think about whether a verb is godan or ichidan when speaking, it’s unnatural to think about what particles are, etc.
You get an explanation for a concept and you internalize it. The explanation is a framework for you to internalize the concept, and once the concept is internalized, you no longer need it. The explanations are still useful, like romaji is still useful. None of the explanations are necessary, some are useful.
Maybe you get a few different partially wrong explanations of what the “wa” particle means before you internalize it. You’re not getting damaged by those explanations, they’re Wittgenstein’s ladder. (Well, maybe you got some bad explanations, but even the good explanations are wrong.)
You throw a bunch of different explanations at different students, combine it with practice and lots of examples, and eventually it sticks.
> which in this example is not actually even the same consonant
By that standard, the “t” in “butter” is not the same consonant as the “t” in “tap” (try it!)
People are really good at understanding and learning phonology and can really internalize it and understand it on an intuitive level, even if they can’t explain the rules for it. If you’re a native English speaker, you accept that there’s a “t” in “butter” and a “t” in “tap” even though they are not the same sounds (phones). That’s because they are the same phonemes.
Romaji is an effective way of writing down Japanese phonemes.
- “Need to” is a very different criterion from “is useful”, and “visually split” is, well, kind of unexpected to me!
- The comparison to native Japanese speakers seems especially irrelevant here,
- You’re not using your native orthography here, you’re using romaji, I don’t think it’s anyone’s native orthography.
- You probably want to use the Romaji heavily anyway, because that’s how most people will use computers.
When you’re learning a language you naturally multiple approaches to understanding a single topic. You’ll see a word written, you’ll hear it. You’ll hear a sentence and then someone will give you an explanation of the grammar, and you’ll compare that with your notes. It’s multimodal and all of these different modes are useful.
Like how romaji is useful for understanding conjugations. Obviously not necessary, just useful.
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.
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.
At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.
So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia.
The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on.
The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
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.
When you're reading, you're trying to identify a substring and map it back to the unit of meaning, which is effectively the kanji. That works seamlessly with Hangul, because it mostly blocks (as syllables) the same way as kanji, and, as you mentioned, the extra vowels and silent consonants provide more disambiguation. With kana, the length you have to scan to read, and then guess at (using only context to disambiguate), a root word, is a lot more arbitrary.
Mechanically kana is just less compressed, less aligned, and makes it harder to visually identify/scan for units of meaning. Obviously Korean shows that you can make different tradeoffs, but for Japanese losing the kanji would probably necessitate reworking Kana as well - and unless the pronunciation changed, it would probably need to be in a way that represents the pitch accent, which is a modifier on the whole syllable, rather than just a few extra consonants or vowels.
What did happen was that we lost obscure words that could only be understood by looking at Chinese characters (because they're used so rarely, or because they sound the same as another more common word) - you could still use them if you wanted to, but unless you also write them in Hanja, it would be confusing, and if you mix gratuitous Hanja into your writing just because you like those words, most young readers will find it pretentious, and I fear, mostly unreadable.
I can't say we lost much by losing these words. Rather, I think it actually forced writers to select less ambiguous words, which is usually a good thing.
(Also, these days most Koreans know much more English than Classical Chinese, so English loanwords can sometimes fill the gap. It helps that most English (or other Western) loanwords sound different from native or Sino-Korean words, so there's less chance of collision.)
I never get this line of reasoning - so are people listening to spoken japanese just in a perpetual state of confusion because they can't see the associated intended Kanji?
Also this coming from a person on a platform who's primary language is commonly pronounced with the last syllable/letter of each word used to start the next one.
The engli shlanguage ha sit sown nonsense.
E.g. "hashi" famously can mean bridge/edge/chopsticks depending on accent, but which accent has which meaning is different in Tokyo vs Osaka.
It's similar to initialisms or emoji in English; it's of course frustrating for people who don't know them, and there are reasonable complaints about some of the extremes, but speakers/writers use them because they find them useful when communicating with an audience that's also assumed to know them.
Kind of humorously, groups sometimes develop lingo to avoid all this. E.g. the JP words for science and chemistry both have the standard pronunciation "kagaku", so people in industries where both terms are used often use nonstandard pronunciations (bakegaku for chemistry).
Also the homophones thing is probably lesser of the things I mentioned. A typical sentence might only have 1 or 2 overloaded words, but it will have lots of substrings that can be parsed multiple ways.
Secondly, there are many homonyms: words written with completely different kanji that sound exactly the same, very similar (e.g. same modulo pitch accent) or use the same spelling in kana.
Here are two words that don't sound the same at all. Let's use Hepburn, because it distinguishes them: kõri and kouri. One has a long o, the other has separate o and u. In hiragana, both are written こうり: exactly the same. kōri might be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) or 高利 (high interest rate). kouri is 小売 (retail, lit. "little selling").
If you're having a conversation with someone and don't know which "kõri" they are talking about, high interest rate or axiom, you can ask. But you cannot just ask a written text. You have to work it out from context.
Kanji eliminate the ambiguity, vastly simplifying reading. Reading Japanese that has been normalized to kana is murder. Especially if spaces are not introduced to mark word divisions. That is only done in hiragana books for small children!
Sometimes this happens in writing. A sentence happens to start with a couple of words that happen to be usually written in hiragana, with some particles after them, and you're left with a puzzle just working out where the word boundaries are. This requires backtracking in the general case; there is no principle like longest match.
Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to kanji regarding which word they mean. Except they don't write down the kanji; they think of a very common word which has that kanji and say things like, "the shō syllable in my word is the same (kanji) as in shōrai".
The vast majority of the Japanese vocabulary consists of word roots made from the combination of two kanji. The language-making itself is not separable from kanji.
Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
I seriously doubt that. Literacy levels rose in Japan during the Meiji era and that produced pressure towards simplification of the writing system. Sure, Japan didn't go all the way to a pure kana system or to a latin-derived script, but the reasons are political and cultural (and there is nothing wrong with that) rather than linguistic.
In any cases, you didn't disprove my point, which is that the need for kanji is self-fulfilling. It feels necessary, precisely because its usage prevents the evolution of the phonetic kana system into something useful.
Well, yes? The language is built on kanji. In a 100,000 word dictionary, the vast amount of content is words that someone made up by putting together kanji. It is kanji-first. None of it makes sense when you strip away the kanji, and formation of new words is blocked. Kanji is a cultural cornerstone.
Before literacy, commoners had 5000 word vocabularies cradle to grave. Anything beyond that was the domain of the erudite elite.
> the phonetic kana system
The kana system is quasi-phonetic. It doesn't capture phonetics accurately, like IPA, and has ambiguities of its own.
But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics!
Sure, you can fix all this if you just change Japanese into another language.
So, it is absolutely baked in and kanji first. without kanji the following tongue twister is indecipherable.
Niwaniwaniwatori ga, uraniwanimoniwaniwatoriga iru.
庭には二羽鶏が、裏庭にも二羽鶏がいる。
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.
While that is true, the kana themselves are not fully systematic for capturing Japanese. Hepburn can capture features that kana do not!
How about this set of examples, which shows both an advantage and drawback of Hepburn.
The hiragana sequence こうり (ko-u-ri) could be several things. one is 小売 (retail) where the division is こ・うり. Or it could be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) where the dividion is こう・り. Here the う in こう is no longer u but a vowel lengthening mark.
Hepburn spells these words differnetly: kouri and kōri.
Now, within this same example cluster we ecounter this: the word for ice is こおり （ko-o-ri). Unfortunately, Hepburn has this as kõri, creating an ambiguity not found in kana.
A modification to Hepburn allowing (or rather requiring) the spelling koori would resolve that.
> Three Japanese words, three Hepburn transcriptions. The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like.
I mean come on.
So… letters?
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.
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.
Add to that that this is content marketing, and the whole thing really collapses. I'll consume interesting content marketing, I may even consume interesting slop, but I can't consume slop content marketing.
Besides this historical motivation, there exists no technical argument in favor of any of them.
I do not agree at all that Nihon-shiki can sabotage the ability of Japanese people to learn and pronounce English.
Except for the native English speakers, all the other people of the World who are familiar with other languages besides their own are also familiar with the fact that every language has its own system of writing and pronunciation, whose rules you must learn, including the alphabet variations.
It is the dominance of English in the international relations after WWII which sabotages the ability of most native English speakers to learn other languages, especially to learn how they are pronounced, so in foreign countries the native English speakers usually stand out much more than the native speakers of any other languages, because of their pronunciation, which is found funny by the locals.
Making the rules for writing your own language more complex for your own country and for most other countries of the World, just to make them simpler for the citizens of a certain privileged country, is not a behavior that I can approve, because I find it too subservient.
Rather, he (rightfully) criticized the generally negative effect caused by the deployment of anglocentric teaching methods (exclusively for the convenience of the Anglo world).
In addition, he observed a negative feedback of such strategems on the Anglo world itself, in as much as it forms an "impediment by convenience" for them to learn about other cultures (and thus rise a bit on the scale of human development).
So in a way what he said is the opposite of what you claim he did. Might that have been what triggered your inadequate reaction?
As for "arrogance", you stated that Kunrei/Nihon have been "sabotaging Japanese people's ability to learn and pronounce English correctly", as if there was any value in that for a civilization that culturally stands much higher than, say, the USA.
And as for "racism", it is well known that was an important factor on the "no prisoners" approach the US took against Japan, and also in terroristically and sadistically napalming one city after another (then repeated in Korea and Vietnam).