Curiously enough, Hepburn romanization fixes some ambiguities in Japanese (Japanese written in kana alone) while introducing others.
The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity.
Where does Hepburn disambiguate?
In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē). The "SEI" is one unit. But in other situations it does not, like in a compound word ending in the E kana, where the second word starts with I. For instance 酒色 (sake + iro -> sakeiro, not sakēro).
Hepburn distinguishes these; the hiragana spelling does not!
This is one of the issues that makes it very hard to read Japanese that is written with hiragana only, rather than kanji. No word breaks and not knowing whether せい is supposed to be sē or sei.
There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing). A lot of the time it is pronounced as karāge, because of the way RA and A come together. Other times you hear a kind of flutter in it which articulates two A's.
I have no idea which romanization to use. Flip a coin?
What's interesting is that they address this problem where the latin alphabet introduces the ambiguity (Is genin げんいん or げにん? Hepburn goes with gen'in for the former to avoid ambiguity), so they could have extended that to sake'iro and applied the same strategy when the ambiguity comes from kana itself.
In the phonetic alphabet it's /e:/ vs. /ei/ and /o:/ vs. /ou/.
If you're an English speaker, you can be forgiven for a very stereotypical trait of the English accent. English speakers have a real hard time with the /e/ or /e:/ sounds as well as the /o/ and /o:/ sounds. Most English dialects don't have either a monophthong /e/ or /o/. Both the long and short tend to get heard as /eɪ/ and /oʊ/.
French enchanté /ɑ̃ ʃɑ̃ te/ is heard and borrowed as /ɑn.ʃɑn.teɪ/. Germany gehen /ge:n/ is heard as "gain" /geɪn/. And Japanese /o:/ and /ou/ both get heard as /oʊ/.
It's arguably a minimal pair in Japanese: 負う /ou/ (to carry), 王 /o:/ (king)
The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact.
Like how many people end up with the same romanized name while being distinct in other alphabets. Then discrepancies between the different systems because they usually are sloppy on the handling of these matters.
Now that most stuff is electronic, these small differences can have wider effects and be a PITA to fix.
They’re not the same. おう is discernible from おお, and the difference can be important.
That said, this is far from the most important problem in Japanese pronunciation for westerners, and at speed the distinction between them can become very subtle.
Do you have an academic source that contends that native speakers pronounce 王さま and the like with rounded lips, even outside of hypercorrection in artificial, isolated contexts?
The language school I attended all but banned romanization. The idea was to learn, practice, and finally internalize kana and kanji as quickly as possible. Hepburn is just a band-aid when it comes to language study.
For people not interested in learning Japanese, however, a unified romanization could have its benefits. It just never struck me as particularly inconsistent to begin with, even after so many years living there.
Kunrei-shiki is intended for domestic Japanese use. That's why it results in spellings that don't make logical sense for any Latin-based phonology. It's too focused on round trip unambiguity at the cost of phonetic clarity for non-Japanese. My big peeve is the company Mitutoyo using K-S, which everyone mispronounces because they don't know it's a poor transcription of "Mitsutoyo".
Yeah my impression was the Orthography is pretty consistent compared to English.
From what I understand this isn't the first time they've made some kind of change to orthography, I remember reading something about updating offical use of certain kana to reflect more modern pronunciations. It wasn't a dramatic change.
It's interesting to see some countries just have this centralised influence over something like how their language is written as they're the main ones speaking it, as opposed to English.
Is been 25 years since I took Japanese in highschool but I'm relatively certain that our textbooks had ち romanized as tchi which from my recollection seems more accurate to its actual common pronunciation.
About a decade ago, I became a fan of the remarkable Japanese child prodigy drummer Kanade Sato. That lead to me to learn the surprising fact that Japan has 4 writing systems: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romanji.
Here's the video that got me interested in Sato www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpFL08m5fQ&list=RDXYpFL08m5fQ&start_radio=1
Hepburn is poorly supported in some input methods, like on Windows. If you want to type kōen or whatever, you really have to work for that ō. It's better now on mobile devices and MacOS (what I'm using now): I just long-pressed o and picked ō from a pop-up.
That's one aspect I really love about macOS. I'm from a small country so nearly no one makes hardware with our exact layout, but with macOS I can always just long press to fill in the gaps. I just wish all apps used native inputs, not some weird half-baked solution they built themselves.
I rarely miss Linux, but I liked being able to have compose keys, most of which were very logical and fast to type. Now on MacOS, I either have to know the option (alt) combination or long press, which makes my writing with accents way slower.
If you frequently write the same characters, it's straightforward to create your own keyboard layout that matches your usage, using https://software.sil.org/ukelele/
What's the best way to type Japanese on Windows? (I have a QWERTY keyboard)
On mobile I just switch to the hiragana keyboard, but that obviously isn't a sane option on desktop unless I'm clicking all the characters with a mouse?
Using the example from the top-level comment, you would install an IME, switch to hiragana mode, start typing "kouen" and convert to kanji when you see the right suggestion.
It might sound complicated at first, but you can do it pretty fast once you get used to it.
I don't know now, but for the longest time, Google made a much better Japanese IME for Windows than Microsoft ("Google Japanese Input"). I started using it when running into reliability issues, like disappearing kanji dictionary, or frozen switching between roman and hiragana.
Assuming Microsoft's Japanese IME is still a dumpster fire, and the Google one has not succumbed to Googleshitification, that would be a way to go.
To enable the Microsoft IME there are some rituals to go through like adding the Japanese language and then a Japanese keyboard under that. It will download some materials, like fonts and dictionaries. A reboot is typically not required, I think, unless you make Japanese the primary language.
Once you have the keyboard, LeftShift + LeftAlt chord goes among the input methods. Ctrl + CapsLock toggles hiragana/romaji input. I think these are the same for Google or MS input.
The article says the new style says that you can use either a macron or a doubled letter, but it's not clear if that's supported for keyboard input on various platforms.
But in the case of ō, you can only use a doubled letter if the underlying word is おお. If it is おう then you don't have a doubled letter you can use; you need "ou" and that's not Hepburn any more. It is "wāpuro rōmaji" (word processor romaji).
Note: bitwize is talking about how to do it on Linux. Which is the best way in my biased opinion. Perhaps not the best mapping for people who use it regularly but is awesome for those who use it irregularly. We can usually guess how to do weird diacritics without having to look it up.
The old official system arguably makes more sense from a Japanese perspective.
If you look at the kana, the Japanese syllabic writing system, they have this ordering: ka ki ku ke ko, sa shi su se so, ta chitsu te to, etc. If you follow the regularity where there should be a "ti" sound there is no "ti" sound and it happens to be pronounced "chi".
One common analysis holds that the underlying phonemes really are: ta ti tu te to. Traditional Japanese grammarians usually analyzed it this way. And they were historically pronounced that way: it has arisen out of relatively recent sound change. Somewhat like how some British speakers pronounce "Tuesday" such that it sounds much like "Chews-day" to speakers of other dialects. Affrication in a fixed context. The t phoneme triggers that kind of affrication obligatorily in Japanese, before the i vowel or y glide.
Some disagree with this as overly theoretic and based excessively on historical linguistics, and they insist that sh and f and ch are distinct phonemes in Japanese. But the Japanese writing system itself treats it as if they were not.
If you are learning Japanese it makes sense to pick a system that reflects the internal logic of kana spelling. If you want to just approximately pronounce Japanese words in English then you want something that reflects the logic of English spelling.
These two goals are always in tension. Mandarin pinyin, for example, was designed to reflect the logic of Mandarin phonology in a consistent way. It's not meant to be easily pronounceable by English speakers. It's to enable Mandarin speakers to look up words in a dictionary or for students of the language to study Mandarin. Though it has ended up used as a pronunciation guide for English speakers. And that often doesn't go well; a lot of English speakers don't know what to do with the q's and x's.
It's a change in purpose. Nihon-shiki was invented to teach Japanese people the Latin alphabet, with a view to replacing kana/kanji with the Latin alphabet. Therefore being understandable to someone with a good idea of the kana layout was the priority.
Hepburn was designed to teach non-Japanese people Japanese, therefore matching well to European (especially English) sounds was considered more important.
Suggesting Japanese romanise is a fringe position these days, much much more so than in the 1880s or the immediate aftermath of WW2, and making that kind of change is much easier when you have a population going from illiterate to literate than in a modern society, so nobody's seriously considered Nihon-shiki (or its slightly modernised descendent, Kunrei-shiki) a gateway to romanising Japanese for the Japanese for a long time now.
So this is sort of an official recognition that the primary purpose of romaji is for the benefit of foreigners.
One issue holding back the adoption of Hepburn has been that the standard national curriculum (gakushū shidō yōryō) calls for all children to be taught romaji beginning in the third grade (previously fourth grade) of elementary school. It's taught in Kokugo (national language, i.e., Japanese) classes and included in those textbooks, as romaji characters are used in Japanese alongside kana and kanji as well as, increasingly, in daily life (user names, passwords, etc.). At that age, native speakers of Japanese can acquire kunreishiki more easily, as the consonant representation corresponds more closely to the Japanese phonology that they have internalized.
For pinyin representation of Mandarin, these are very different sounds, while the equivalent (identical) Mandarin pinyin representation of し, じ, つ would be xi, ji, cu. I'm not as familiar with romanization systems closer to Latin pronunciations, but for Wade Giles it would probably be written like shi, chi, tsu.
You mean, if you would apply the inverse of the standard romanization of Mandarin, the resulting sound would be closer to the Japanese sound, if starting from the Kunrei spelling than if starting from the Hepburn spelling?
> It sounds way closer to the spoken sounds, at least to my western ears.
That's the thing... to some other non-English language speakers, the existing/old romanization method actually is more accurate regarding how the letters would be pronounced to them, especially coming from languages that don't have the same e.g. [ch] or [ts] sounds as written with Hepburn.
The one technical downside I would say to this change is, 1:1 machine transliteration is no longer possible with Hepburn.
I don't know the details history of the system's development, however I notice that with Kunrei everything spelling is neatly 2 characters while with Hepburn it may be 2 or 3 characters:
Kunrei: ki si ti ni hi mi
Hepburn: ki shi chi ni hi mi
The politics of the issue is obviously that Hepburn is older and an American system while Nihon and Kunrei are very purposely domestic (Nihon "is much more regular than Hepburn romanization, and unlike Hepburn's system, it makes no effort to make itself easier to pronounce for English-speakers" [1]). Apparently, Hepburn was later imposed by US occupying forces in 1945.
Perhaps 80 years is long enough and suitable to effect the change officially with no loss of face.
"Better" depends on what you care about. _konniti-wa_ (which is the Kunrei-siki romanization of こんにちは, _konniti-ha_ is Nihon-shiki form that preserves the irregular use of は as topic-marking /wa/) and _susi-o_ (again, Kunrei-siki ignores a native script orthographic irregularity and romanizes を as _o_ not _wo_ ) are more consistent with the native phonological system of Japanese. In Japanese coronal consonants like /t/ and /s/ are regularly palatalized to /tS/ and /S/ before the vowel /i/, and there's no reason to treat _chi_ and _ti_ as meaningfully different sequences of sounds. Linguists writing about Japanese phonology use it instead of Hepburn for good reason.
Obviously, being more transparent to English-readers is also a reasonable goal a romanization system might have, and if that's your goal the Hepburn is a better system. I don't have a strong opinion about which system the Japanese government should treat as official, and realistically neither one is going to go away. But it's simply not the case that Hepburn is a better romanization scheme for every purpose.
I don't see how kunrei-shiki is useful at all. If I want to write Japanese words so non-Japanese speakers can pronounce them approximately, then Hepburn is the way to go. If I want to write Japanese words so Japanese speakers can read them best, I'll write them in actual Japanese. This isn't 1975, and computers are perfectly able to render hiragana, katakana, and kanji. What do I need kunrei-shiki for? I've been living in Japan for years now, and have never found a use for it.
If French didn't use the Roman alphabet natively, you might have a point.
At some point you might as well use Roman characters the way the Cherokee alphabet does - which is to say, uses some of the shapes without paying attention to what sounds they made in English.
And the way English generally uses the Roman alphabet (obviously excluding the zillions of irregularities) isn't that far off from how most European languages use the Roman alphabet.
I'd expect that Spanish, German and French speakers would benefit just as much as English speakers from these changes.
> And the way English generally uses the Roman alphabet (obviously excluding the zillions of irregularities) isn't that far off from how most European languages use the Roman alphabet.
Its not far off from the union of how all other European languages use the Roman alphabet, would be closer to accurate.
Sure, but the point is this isn't really making romanized Japanese more English-like. It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet. This isn't an Anglo-centric thing, it's just good common sense - unless your goal is to make it harder to pronounce your language properly, which seems like an obvious own-goal.
> It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet.
There is no way "every other language already uses the Roman alphabet."
Many languages are internally consistent in how they use it, but those that are aren't consistent with each other. And then there is English, which does pretty much everything any other language which uses the Roman alphabet does somewhere, and probably a few that none of the other extant languages normally using that alphabet do with it, on top.
About 30% of people worldwide use a language that's not written in Roman alphabet.
Additionally, being written in Roman alphabet doesn't neccessarily mean it's clear how to pronounce it. Hungarians calls their country "Magyarország", but unless you know Hungarian, you will be surprised with how it's pronounced. Same as "Chenonceaux", "Tekirdağ" or "Crkvina".
Those are especially pathological cases, and not especially relevant to this discussion, as the romanization rules are explicitly designed to be consistent.
Kunrei makes more sense to a Japanese native, Hepburn makes more sense to a non-Japanese native. As the article points out, Hepburn has come to dominate, so they're simply aligning with it rather than having two systems hanging around.
I live in Thailand and I cannot get over the fact that romanization is (seemingly?) completely unstandardized. Even government signage uses different English spelling of Thai words.
You should have seen Taiwan in the 1990s. It was a hot mess of older Western romanization systems, historical and dialectical exceptions, competing Taiwanese and pro-China sensibilities, a widely used international standard (pinyin), and lots of confusion in official and private circles about the proper way to write names and locations using the Latin alphabet. In 1998, the City of Taipei even made up its own Romanization system for street names at the behest of its then-new mayor, a supporter of Taiwan independence (https://pinyin.info/news/2019/article-on-early-tongyong-piny...).
The chart halfway down this blog post lays out some of the challenges once the hanyu pinyin standard was instituted in 2009:
So that’s why people in Taiwan can’t spell anything consistently and why all the English-language newspapers spell the same things differently. As for me, I’m giving up on trying to remember how everyone spells their name. I know lots of people, especially Taiwan nationalists, dislike having the PRC hanyu pinyin system. I dislike imposing it upon them. However, in only three weeks, I’ve found myself spelling the same thing in multiple ways and wasting time looking up how I did it last time. Since almost no one reads my blog anyway, I’ll do it the way that’s most convenient for me.
I’ll also always provide the Chinese characters so that people who can read them know who I’m talking about.
Yeah, my full names are Jeremia Josiah, and on my work permit they wrote the Thai version as เจอเรเมีย โยชิอา. I cannot figure out why they chose to use จ for the J in Jeremia but ย for the J in Josiah. Both are pronounced the same and I would consider จ the correct choice. I would consider ย more correct for representing a word with Y.
Korea is stuck in a funny middle ground, where names like cities or railway stations all follow the standard without exception, while personal or corporate names are in a state of total chaos. So the cell phone maker is Samsung, but the subway station in Seoul is Samseong, even though they're written and pronounced in the same way in Korean. (No, they aren't related.)
It's unfortunate but I don't think it'll get fixed any time soon. Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No. (The most common romanization for these family names would be: Lee, Oh, Woo, Ahn, and Roh.)
No country is going to force their big multinationals to change their international name they chose back in the 50s and are now known as world-wide. Personal names aren't too chaotic either, as the choice presented when choosing a romanization is limited, people can't just make stuff up on the ground. They're off, but generally in the same ways.
> Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No.
An is pretty common - given the massive reach of KPop among global youth, I wouldn't be surprised if the most well-known 안씨 as of 2025 was an "An" (a member of the group 아이브). Roh has fallen out of favor, young 노s generally go with Noh, the Rohs are usually older people. I too do long for the day where an 이 or 우 just goes with I or U, or if they must, at least Ih or Uh :)
IMO you left out the worst offender, Park. At least with 이 or 우 I can see why people would be hesitant to go the proper route, as most of the world is unfamiliar with single-phoneme names, but 박s have no excuse.
With 이, there's a pretty good alternative as well, and what's more - it's actually already in use when talking about the greatest Korean in history, Yi Sun-Shin! So much better than "Lee".
Oh there are plenty of standards, including an official one. The problem is nobody uses them. Thai writing is weird, and between the tones and the character classes and silent letters might as well just make some shit up. My birth certificate, drivers license, and work permit all had different spellings of my name on them.
IIRC, the road signs for “Henri Dunant Road” were spelled differently on either end, which was ironic, because at least that did have a canonical Latin form.
That would work nicely in an abstract spherical Japan in pure vacuum.
The hardest bit about redoing something from scratch is not how to design the new system, but it's in getting it adopted. Many societies have tried things like that, social inertia, especially paired with learning barriers (the steeper, the worse), and cultural and political notions (and Japan values and tries to preserve their history and culture quite a lot) is not something that can be just dismissed.
That's not to say that there weren't countries that had writing system overhauls, just that it's difficult and of questionable value and not entirely without negative effects.
The issue is that its not theirs and that is exactly the problem. You can't just use China's writing system and try to make it fit to your language. Japan might have a high literacy rate but that is despite their horrible system and not because of it. Plus you can argue that they're not really literate, they just limit themselves to using a small portion of their 'kanji' and write little hiragana hints that tell you how to pronounce the written symbols for all the rest.
Modern Japanese is half Chinese in its vocabulary, hence its only consequential for the writing system to be as well. The former wouldn't work without the latter.
> You can't just use China's writing system and try to make it fit to your language
And yet we took the roman alphabet and adopted it to english just fine, why was that okay but adopting the chinese writing system into Japanese wasn't?
> you can argue that they're not really literate, they just limit themselves to using a small portion of their 'kanji' and write little hiragana hints that tell you how to pronounce the written symbols for all the rest.
You can argue english speakers aren't really literate, they just limit themselves to a subset of english vocabulary, and memorize word pronunciations to understand when "ea" is pronounced like "e" as in "sear", or "air" like in "wear".
Like, I do not get at all what you're arguing here. In every language people only know a subset of the total vocabulary, and people general limit themselves to the subset that's actually used. In phonetic languages, sure you can pronounce an unknown word, but that doesn't mean you have any clue what it means. In non-phonetic languages, like English and Japanese, you may not even be able to pronounce an unknown word. In hieroglyphic languages, like Japanese and Chinese, you may be able to derive the meaning and pronunciation of a new word just from looking at the component characters and knowing their individual reading and meanings, often with better success than trying to guess an unfamiliar english word from its roots.
>and Japan values and tries to preserve their history and culture quite a lot
Has to be said though that reform can be interpreted in exactly that way too, as revitalization. Hangul for example is also a kind of patriotic achievement. I've even heard, and that was coming from a Japanese friend (who speaks both languages): "we have the world's best and most logical writing system and the most illogical right here next to each other". And in the language department and the origins of their writing systems they're in a fairly comparable boat, just went in two very different directions.
I think Hangul worked because it was adopted at a time of mass increases in literacy. All those poor people who never wrote before didn't have any attachment to Chinese characters, and soon significantly outnumbered any monks, nobles, bureaucrats and merchants that were attached to them.
You are getting downvoted, but I have heard Japan has surprisingly low literacy rates (well below the 99% stated by the government) for just this reason.
I am not sure about the literacy rates, but I live in Japan and pretty much every single Japanese person I have ever talked to has told me how painful kanji are and how they wished the Japanese writing system was easier.
In comparison, my mother language is Spanish, a language with very simple spelling rules. My girlfriend is always surprised how she can read out loud a random Spanish text and even though she doesn't understand it, I will understand her easily (it also helps that both languages have very similar sounds).
How? Near enough no one was using the Kunrei system for any of that. If anything this will make it more consistent or at least no worse. Macrons are the biggest inconsistency but that’s always been the case.
It was either Hepburn, the English title (i.e. rock instead of rokku), or just most sensibly kana/kanji that would have been used for this everywhere, never other romanisation systems, to within a rounding error.
For people not familiar with Japanese, finding any info about a Japanese-language game can be a pain. They may have a Japanese representation, an official romanized name, a community romanized name using a different system… plus may also go by an outright English-language name, in some circles, which may (or may not) overlap with the name of an English-language port (if it exists). Then consider that some games have pretty extreme and confusing name variants in various editions or on different platforms, and those may go by different names in different contexts.
You can see the same game go by three different names on a community forum, Wikipedia, and a catalogue of games + md5sums for a system (you might think the md5sum could act as a Rosetta Stone here… but less so than you’d think, especially in the specific context of an English speaker and Japanese games, as you sometimes need some specific, old, oddball and slightly-broken dump of a game to get the one a particular English patch requires… and god knows what name you’ll find that under, but probably not the same md5sum as a clean dump)
The only bright spot in this is that if you can find a Japanese game on Wikipedia the very first superscript-citation almost always lists the official Japanese title in Japanese script on hover. That’s a life saver. (Presumably all of this is easier if you know at least some Japanese)
Though after I posted my comment I realized they mean they’re switching to another existing system (which I think is already widely used in gaming circles? Not sure though) which isn’t so bad. At least it’s not another one being added to the mix.
Even with official names of media you can get stuck.
Consider 彼氏彼女の事情[1]. The Japanese name is the same for the Manga and Anime, but the official names for the US localization of each are different (the manga went with a romanization of an abbreviation of the Japanese name Kare Kano while the Anime went with a translation of the full name His and Her Circumstances.
終末何してますか？忙しいですか？救ってもらっていいですか？ has an "English" title on it's Japanese cover beside the Japanese one "Do you have what THE END? Are you busy? Shall you save XXX?". I'm guessing the author did it themselves. The capitalisation on THE END is presumably supposed to reflect on 終末 (shuumatsu - the end [often used for apocalypses etc]) punning on 週末 (shuumatsu - weekend) and the XXX is because the Japanese title gets to omit the subject and English can't.
Needless to say, the official English translations didn't keep that title, going with "What are you doing at the end of the world? Are you busy? Will you save us?"
Some background for those who aren't familiar: "Romanization" refers to converting Japanese sounds into the Latin (Roman) alphabet. In Japanese, these sounds are written with phonetic characters called kana. (There are two types of kana; I'm only going to talk about hiragana here.) Each kana represents either a vowel or a consonant followed by a vowel. For example: あ (a), こ (ko), ね (ne). Aside from a terminating n/m sound (ん), there are no characters for standalone consonants. There are five vowels (a i u e o).
The kana are usually written in a table where each row is a vowel and each column is a consonant, like on Wikipedia[1]. Most columns of the table have five characters, each representing the same consonant combined with one of the vowels. For example: か/き/く/け/こ ka/ki/ku/ke/ko, ま/み/む/め/も ma/mi/mu/me/mo. Some columns have "missing" sounds (や/ゆ/よ ya/yu/yo); but what's important for our purposes is that some columns have irregular sounds: さ/し/す/せ/そ sa/shi/su/se/so and た/ち/つ/て/と ta/chi/tsu/te/to. There are no si, ti, or tu sounds in standard Japanese; they have shi, chi, and tsu instead.
Using diacritic markings gets you more consonants. Most of these are made by adding a couple tick marks to the corner of the character, which makes the consonant voiced instead of unvoiced. For example: か ka -> が ga, と to -> ど do, ひ hi -> び bi. But the irregular sounds stay irregular: し shi -> じ ji instead of zi, ち chi -> ぢ ji (again) instead of di, and つ tsu -> づ zu instead of du. (す su -> ず zu gives the same sound but in a regular way.)
You can also combine i-vowel characters with y-consonant characters to get sounds with consonant clusters: き ki + や ya = きゃ kya, み mi + よ yo = みょ myo, etc. The irregular sounds remain irregular: し shi + ゆ yu = しゅ shu (instead of syu), ち chi + や ya = ちゃ cha (instead of tya), じ ji + よ yo = じょ jo (instead of zyo). There's a Reddit post with a nice table showing all the available sounds[2].
Now the problem for romanization is this: Should the romanization reflect the irregular sounds in the spoken language? Or should it reflect the regular groupings of the kana characters? づ and ず might both be pronounced "zu", but they come from different linguistic origins, just as "bear" and "bare" do in English. The Hepburn system uses spellings that match the sounds, while the current standard (Kunrei-shiki) uses spellings that match the kana grouping: し si (instead of shi), ち ti (instead of chi), じ zi (instead of ji), つ tu (instead of tsu), じょ syo (instead of sho), etc.
The Hepburn system tells you how to pronounce the word[3] at the cost of being a lossy encoding. For anyone familiar with the Latin alphabet, that's almost always the better choice, and it's nearly universal in the Western world. Kunrei-shiki does better reflect the underlying structure of the Japanese language and its native writing system, which is probably why the Japanese government preferred it. But anyone who wants to learn the language is going to learn the kana almost immediately (it's just a few hours with flash cards), so IMHO that's pretty small advantage.
I deliberately didn't talk about long vowels, glottal stops, the differences between hiragana and katakana, different pronunciations of ん (n), or how to handle ん (n) followed by a vowel, but if you're curious about Japanese romanization those topics may also be of interest to you. I can try to explain more if anyone's curious.
The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity.
Where does Hepburn disambiguate?
In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē). The "SEI" is one unit. But in other situations it does not, like in a compound word ending in the E kana, where the second word starts with I. For instance 酒色 (sake + iro -> sakeiro, not sakēro).
Hepburn distinguishes these; the hiragana spelling does not!
This is one of the issues that makes it very hard to read Japanese that is written with hiragana only, rather than kanji. No word breaks and not knowing whether せい is supposed to be sē or sei.
There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing). A lot of the time it is pronounced as karāge, because of the way RA and A come together. Other times you hear a kind of flutter in it which articulates two A's.
I have no idea which romanization to use. Flip a coin?
If you're an English speaker, you can be forgiven for a very stereotypical trait of the English accent. English speakers have a real hard time with the /e/ or /e:/ sounds as well as the /o/ and /o:/ sounds. Most English dialects don't have either a monophthong /e/ or /o/. Both the long and short tend to get heard as /eɪ/ and /oʊ/.
French enchanté /ɑ̃ ʃɑ̃ te/ is heard and borrowed as /ɑn.ʃɑn.teɪ/. Germany gehen /ge:n/ is heard as "gain" /geɪn/. And Japanese /o:/ and /ou/ both get heard as /oʊ/.
It's arguably a minimal pair in Japanese: 負う /ou/ (to carry), 王 /o:/ (king)
Like how many people end up with the same romanized name while being distinct in other alphabets. Then discrepancies between the different systems because they usually are sloppy on the handling of these matters.
Now that most stuff is electronic, these small differences can have wider effects and be a PITA to fix.
That said, this is far from the most important problem in Japanese pronunciation for westerners, and at speed the distinction between them can become very subtle.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
For people not interested in learning Japanese, however, a unified romanization could have its benefits. It just never struck me as particularly inconsistent to begin with, even after so many years living there.
From what I understand this isn't the first time they've made some kind of change to orthography, I remember reading something about updating offical use of certain kana to reflect more modern pronunciations. It wasn't a dramatic change.
It's interesting to see some countries just have this centralised influence over something like how their language is written as they're the main ones speaking it, as opposed to English.
Here's the video that got me interested in Sato www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpFL08m5fQ&list=RDXYpFL08m5fQ&start_radio=1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
I find this often with apps and websites, and I speak/write British English (or attempt to).
Why effort is put into making a worse interface is baffling.
On mobile I just switch to the hiragana keyboard, but that obviously isn't a sane option on desktop unless I'm clicking all the characters with a mouse?
It might sound complicated at first, but you can do it pretty fast once you get used to it.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/input/japane...
Assuming Microsoft's Japanese IME is still a dumpster fire, and the Google one has not succumbed to Googleshitification, that would be a way to go.
To enable the Microsoft IME there are some rituals to go through like adding the Japanese language and then a Japanese keyboard under that. It will download some materials, like fonts and dictionaries. A reboot is typically not required, I think, unless you make Japanese the primary language.
Once you have the keyboard, LeftShift + LeftAlt chord goes among the input methods. Ctrl + CapsLock toggles hiragana/romaji input. I think these are the same for Google or MS input.
big if true, jesus christ microsoft
[edit]
Wikipedia suggests it might be from Wāpuro rōmaji, where "u" is always used to spell the kana "う"
> The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu.
I could imagine si, zi and tu sound closer to the spoken sounds to Mandarin speakers.
If you look at the kana, the Japanese syllabic writing system, they have this ordering: ka ki ku ke ko, sa shi su se so, ta chi tsu te to, etc. If you follow the regularity where there should be a "ti" sound there is no "ti" sound and it happens to be pronounced "chi".
One common analysis holds that the underlying phonemes really are: ta ti tu te to. Traditional Japanese grammarians usually analyzed it this way. And they were historically pronounced that way: it has arisen out of relatively recent sound change. Somewhat like how some British speakers pronounce "Tuesday" such that it sounds much like "Chews-day" to speakers of other dialects. Affrication in a fixed context. The t phoneme triggers that kind of affrication obligatorily in Japanese, before the i vowel or y glide.
Some disagree with this as overly theoretic and based excessively on historical linguistics, and they insist that sh and f and ch are distinct phonemes in Japanese. But the Japanese writing system itself treats it as if they were not.
If you are learning Japanese it makes sense to pick a system that reflects the internal logic of kana spelling. If you want to just approximately pronounce Japanese words in English then you want something that reflects the logic of English spelling.
These two goals are always in tension. Mandarin pinyin, for example, was designed to reflect the logic of Mandarin phonology in a consistent way. It's not meant to be easily pronounceable by English speakers. It's to enable Mandarin speakers to look up words in a dictionary or for students of the language to study Mandarin. Though it has ended up used as a pronunciation guide for English speakers. And that often doesn't go well; a lot of English speakers don't know what to do with the q's and x's.
Hepburn was designed to teach non-Japanese people Japanese, therefore matching well to European (especially English) sounds was considered more important.
Suggesting Japanese romanise is a fringe position these days, much much more so than in the 1880s or the immediate aftermath of WW2, and making that kind of change is much easier when you have a population going from illiterate to literate than in a modern society, so nobody's seriously considered Nihon-shiki (or its slightly modernised descendent, Kunrei-shiki) a gateway to romanising Japanese for the Japanese for a long time now.
So this is sort of an official recognition that the primary purpose of romaji is for the benefit of foreigners.
That's the thing... to some other non-English language speakers, the existing/old romanization method actually is more accurate regarding how the letters would be pronounced to them, especially coming from languages that don't have the same e.g. [ch] or [ts] sounds as written with Hepburn.
The one technical downside I would say to this change is, 1:1 machine transliteration is no longer possible with Hepburn.
Kunrei: ki si ti ni hi mi
Hepburn: ki shi chi ni hi mi
The politics of the issue is obviously that Hepburn is older and an American system while Nihon and Kunrei are very purposely domestic (Nihon "is much more regular than Hepburn romanization, and unlike Hepburn's system, it makes no effort to make itself easier to pronounce for English-speakers" [1]). Apparently, Hepburn was later imposed by US occupying forces in 1945.
Perhaps 80 years is long enough and suitable to effect the change officially with no loss of face.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki
Obviously, being more transparent to English-readers is also a reasonable goal a romanization system might have, and if that's your goal the Hepburn is a better system. I don't have a strong opinion about which system the Japanese government should treat as official, and realistically neither one is going to go away. But it's simply not the case that Hepburn is a better romanization scheme for every purpose.
Romanization is, by and large, a thing that exists for people who already know European/Western languages.
Already done.
- Komen ça va? - Mo byin, mærsi.
We don't have anything against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole, do we?
At some point you might as well use Roman characters the way the Cherokee alphabet does - which is to say, uses some of the shapes without paying attention to what sounds they made in English.
I'd expect that Spanish, German and French speakers would benefit just as much as English speakers from these changes.
Its not far off from the union of how all other European languages use the Roman alphabet, would be closer to accurate.
There is no way "every other language already uses the Roman alphabet."
Many languages are internally consistent in how they use it, but those that are aren't consistent with each other. And then there is English, which does pretty much everything any other language which uses the Roman alphabet does somewhere, and probably a few that none of the other extant languages normally using that alphabet do with it, on top.
Additionally, being written in Roman alphabet doesn't neccessarily mean it's clear how to pronounce it. Hungarians calls their country "Magyarország", but unless you know Hungarian, you will be surprised with how it's pronounced. Same as "Chenonceaux", "Tekirdağ" or "Crkvina".
English is already heavily Norman-ized. Half of our vocabulary - including the word pronounce - comes from French.
Use *h₂enǵʰ-ish please.
Is that an anti-China thing? Or is it a simplification thing?
I don't fully understand the underlying motivation.
The chart halfway down this blog post lays out some of the challenges once the hanyu pinyin standard was instituted in 2009:
https://frozengarlic.wordpress.com/on-romanization/
The author concludes with this observation:
So that’s why people in Taiwan can’t spell anything consistently and why all the English-language newspapers spell the same things differently. As for me, I’m giving up on trying to remember how everyone spells their name. I know lots of people, especially Taiwan nationalists, dislike having the PRC hanyu pinyin system. I dislike imposing it upon them. However, in only three weeks, I’ve found myself spelling the same thing in multiple ways and wasting time looking up how I did it last time. Since almost no one reads my blog anyway, I’ll do it the way that’s most convenient for me.
I’ll also always provide the Chinese characters so that people who can read them know who I’m talking about.
There’s a surprising amount of interesting articles on wikipedia about that.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)#Spelling_re...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensational_spelling
It's unfortunate but I don't think it'll get fixed any time soon. Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No. (The most common romanization for these family names would be: Lee, Oh, Woo, Ahn, and Roh.)
No country is going to force their big multinationals to change their international name they chose back in the 50s and are now known as world-wide. Personal names aren't too chaotic either, as the choice presented when choosing a romanization is limited, people can't just make stuff up on the ground. They're off, but generally in the same ways.
> Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No.
An is pretty common - given the massive reach of KPop among global youth, I wouldn't be surprised if the most well-known 안씨 as of 2025 was an "An" (a member of the group 아이브). Roh has fallen out of favor, young 노s generally go with Noh, the Rohs are usually older people. I too do long for the day where an 이 or 우 just goes with I or U, or if they must, at least Ih or Uh :)
IMO you left out the worst offender, Park. At least with 이 or 우 I can see why people would be hesitant to go the proper route, as most of the world is unfamiliar with single-phoneme names, but 박s have no excuse.
With 이, there's a pretty good alternative as well, and what's more - it's actually already in use when talking about the greatest Korean in history, Yi Sun-Shin! So much better than "Lee".
IIRC, the road signs for “Henri Dunant Road” were spelled differently on either end, which was ironic, because at least that did have a canonical Latin form.
The hardest bit about redoing something from scratch is not how to design the new system, but it's in getting it adopted. Many societies have tried things like that, social inertia, especially paired with learning barriers (the steeper, the worse), and cultural and political notions (and Japan values and tries to preserve their history and culture quite a lot) is not something that can be just dismissed.
That's not to say that there weren't countries that had writing system overhauls, just that it's difficult and of questionable value and not entirely without negative effects.
And yet we took the roman alphabet and adopted it to english just fine, why was that okay but adopting the chinese writing system into Japanese wasn't?
> you can argue that they're not really literate, they just limit themselves to using a small portion of their 'kanji' and write little hiragana hints that tell you how to pronounce the written symbols for all the rest.
You can argue english speakers aren't really literate, they just limit themselves to a subset of english vocabulary, and memorize word pronunciations to understand when "ea" is pronounced like "e" as in "sear", or "air" like in "wear".
Like, I do not get at all what you're arguing here. In every language people only know a subset of the total vocabulary, and people general limit themselves to the subset that's actually used. In phonetic languages, sure you can pronounce an unknown word, but that doesn't mean you have any clue what it means. In non-phonetic languages, like English and Japanese, you may not even be able to pronounce an unknown word. In hieroglyphic languages, like Japanese and Chinese, you may be able to derive the meaning and pronunciation of a new word just from looking at the component characters and knowing their individual reading and meanings, often with better success than trying to guess an unfamiliar english word from its roots.
Has to be said though that reform can be interpreted in exactly that way too, as revitalization. Hangul for example is also a kind of patriotic achievement. I've even heard, and that was coming from a Japanese friend (who speaks both languages): "we have the world's best and most logical writing system and the most illogical right here next to each other". And in the language department and the origins of their writing systems they're in a fairly comparable boat, just went in two very different directions.
In comparison, my mother language is Spanish, a language with very simple spelling rules. My girlfriend is always surprised how she can read out loud a random Spanish text and even though she doesn't understand it, I will understand her easily (it also helps that both languages have very similar sounds).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972
English-friendly Romanization system proposed for Japanese language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42606969 - Jan 2025 (23 comments)
Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972 - March 2024 (97 comments)
This is going to make finding specific Japanese game roms even more annoying.
It was either Hepburn, the English title (i.e. rock instead of rokku), or just most sensibly kana/kanji that would have been used for this everywhere, never other romanisation systems, to within a rounding error.
You can see the same game go by three different names on a community forum, Wikipedia, and a catalogue of games + md5sums for a system (you might think the md5sum could act as a Rosetta Stone here… but less so than you’d think, especially in the specific context of an English speaker and Japanese games, as you sometimes need some specific, old, oddball and slightly-broken dump of a game to get the one a particular English patch requires… and god knows what name you’ll find that under, but probably not the same md5sum as a clean dump)
The only bright spot in this is that if you can find a Japanese game on Wikipedia the very first superscript-citation almost always lists the official Japanese title in Japanese script on hover. That’s a life saver. (Presumably all of this is easier if you know at least some Japanese)
Though after I posted my comment I realized they mean they’re switching to another existing system (which I think is already widely used in gaming circles? Not sure though) which isn’t so bad. At least it’s not another one being added to the mix.
Consider 彼氏彼女の事情[1]. The Japanese name is the same for the Manga and Anime, but the official names for the US localization of each are different (the manga went with a romanization of an abbreviation of the Japanese name Kare Kano while the Anime went with a translation of the full name His and Her Circumstances.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kare_Kano
Needless to say, the official English translations didn't keep that title, going with "What are you doing at the end of the world? Are you busy? Will you save us?"
The kana are usually written in a table where each row is a vowel and each column is a consonant, like on Wikipedia[1]. Most columns of the table have five characters, each representing the same consonant combined with one of the vowels. For example: か/き/く/け/こ ka/ki/ku/ke/ko, ま/み/む/め/も ma/mi/mu/me/mo. Some columns have "missing" sounds (や/ゆ/よ ya/yu/yo); but what's important for our purposes is that some columns have irregular sounds: さ/し/す/せ/そ sa/shi/su/se/so and た/ち/つ/て/と ta/chi/tsu/te/to. There are no si, ti, or tu sounds in standard Japanese; they have shi, chi, and tsu instead.
Using diacritic markings gets you more consonants. Most of these are made by adding a couple tick marks to the corner of the character, which makes the consonant voiced instead of unvoiced. For example: か ka -> が ga, と to -> ど do, ひ hi -> び bi. But the irregular sounds stay irregular: し shi -> じ ji instead of zi, ち chi -> ぢ ji (again) instead of di, and つ tsu -> づ zu instead of du. (す su -> ず zu gives the same sound but in a regular way.)
You can also combine i-vowel characters with y-consonant characters to get sounds with consonant clusters: き ki + や ya = きゃ kya, み mi + よ yo = みょ myo, etc. The irregular sounds remain irregular: し shi + ゆ yu = しゅ shu (instead of syu), ち chi + や ya = ちゃ cha (instead of tya), じ ji + よ yo = じょ jo (instead of zyo). There's a Reddit post with a nice table showing all the available sounds[2].
Now the problem for romanization is this: Should the romanization reflect the irregular sounds in the spoken language? Or should it reflect the regular groupings of the kana characters? づ and ず might both be pronounced "zu", but they come from different linguistic origins, just as "bear" and "bare" do in English. The Hepburn system uses spellings that match the sounds, while the current standard (Kunrei-shiki) uses spellings that match the kana grouping: し si (instead of shi), ち ti (instead of chi), じ zi (instead of ji), つ tu (instead of tsu), じょ syo (instead of sho), etc.
The Hepburn system tells you how to pronounce the word[3] at the cost of being a lossy encoding. For anyone familiar with the Latin alphabet, that's almost always the better choice, and it's nearly universal in the Western world. Kunrei-shiki does better reflect the underlying structure of the Japanese language and its native writing system, which is probably why the Japanese government preferred it. But anyone who wants to learn the language is going to learn the kana almost immediately (it's just a few hours with flash cards), so IMHO that's pretty small advantage.
I deliberately didn't talk about long vowels, glottal stops, the differences between hiragana and katakana, different pronunciations of ん (n), or how to handle ん (n) followed by a vowel, but if you're curious about Japanese romanization those topics may also be of interest to you. I can try to explain more if anyone's curious.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kana_chart_1.png [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/awzw04/kana_... [3] Most of the consonants are the same as English or close enough and are trivial to write in the Latin alphabet. The big exception is ら/り/る/れ/ろ, normally written ra/ri/ru/re/ro but it's not really the English r sound. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_tap...