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The ambiguous characters in Hepburn are zu (ず) and zu (du) (づ) and o(お) and o (wo) (を). They can be quite confusing to new learners. I think pinyin is hard to

The ambiguous characters in Hepburn are zu (ず) and zu (du) (づ) and o(お) and o (wo) (を). They can be quite confusing to new learners. I think pinyin is hard to understand for a layman. Eg how many people said Guangzhou or Sichuan correctly on the first go?!

_delirium 11y ago
I don't think pinyin is that hard to understand as a layman, at least no harder than a typical Latin-alphabet language other than your own. It's not great if your goal were a phonetic transliteration into English, but even most European languages would fail that test. For example Polish has quite unintuitive spelling for an English speaker. Same with Portuguese and Danish for that matter. If you put pinyin alongside those languages as just another Latin-script-using-language, I don't find it especially weird, basically in the normal range of variation. An English speaker has to learn specific rules to pronounce it (approximately) correctly, but not an unusually large number of them.
- rangibaby 11y ago
  Good point, like "Ypres" or "Orleans". Thanks
glandium 11y ago
You forgot zi/ji (じ, si/shi with a dakuten diacritic) and zi/di (ぢ, ti/chi with a dakuten diacritic) O and wo are not ambiguous in Hepburn, as they are being explicitly differentiated. Another thing that Hepburn doesn't help with is は, transliterated as "wa" in the case it's the enclitic particle, instead of "ha".
- rangibaby 11y ago
  "wo" is definitely o in Hepburn. It is in ISO 3602 too, but that has an exception for wo. I did some research on Japanese wikipedia (四つ仮名) and found that most uses of di and du were changed to zi and zu in 1986: ふじ(mountain) and ふぢ (flower) are now both written ふじ. There is a list of words that have changed and ones that haven't. The government decided that the particle wa should be written ha in 1955: 助詞のはは,はと書くことを本則とする (an actual law) I don't really have a point, but I now know a lot about kana usage. ISO 3602 makes a lot of sense to me because it is unambiguous in principal, but also allows phonetic spelling when necessary. With the number of variations of romaji I have seen, even in official usage, it's a wonder why they bother. I have found Japan to be a place that makes a lot of rules, then makes following them optional (then saying "there is no excuse" when you break them and get caught.)

_delirium 11y ago

I don't think pinyin is that hard to understand as a layman, at least no harder than a typical Latin-alphabet language other than your own. It's not great if your goal were a phonetic transliteration into English, but even most European languages would fail that test. For example Polish has quite unintuitive spelling for an English speaker. Same with Portuguese and Danish for that matter. If you put pinyin alongside those languages as just another Latin-script-using-language, I don't find it especially weird, basically in the normal range of variation. An English speaker has to learn specific rules to pronounce it (approximately) correctly, but not an unusually large number of them.

rangibaby 11y ago
Good point, like "Ypres" or "Orleans". Thanks

glandium 11y ago

You forgot zi/ji (じ, si/shi with a dakuten diacritic) and zi/di (ぢ, ti/chi with a dakuten diacritic) O and wo are not ambiguous in Hepburn, as they are being explicitly differentiated. Another thing that Hepburn doesn't help with is は, transliterated as "wa" in the case it's the enclitic particle, instead of "ha".

rangibaby 11y ago
"wo" is definitely o in Hepburn. It is in ISO 3602 too, but that has an exception for wo. I did some research on Japanese wikipedia (四つ仮名) and found that most uses of di and du were changed to zi and zu in 1986: ふじ(mountain) and ふぢ (flower) are now both written ふじ. There is a list of words that have changed and ones that haven't. The government decided that the particle wa should be written ha in 1955: 助詞のはは,はと書くことを本則とする (an actual law) I don't really have a point, but I now know a lot about kana usage. ISO 3602 makes a lot of sense to me because it is unambiguous in principal, but also allows phonetic spelling when necessary. With the number of variations of romaji I have seen, even in official usage, it's a wonder why they bother. I have found Japan to be a place that makes a lot of rules, then makes following them optional (then saying "there is no excuse" when you break them and get caught.)