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This is fascinating, I've done few tools around Japanese but never so deep as this. I find this conversion to the full foreign word a bit odd though: カツ丼。豚カツ。カ

This is fascinating, I've done few tools around Japanese but never so deep as this. I find this conversion to the full foreign word a bit odd though: カツ丼。豚カツ。カツカレー。カツ。 Katsudon. Tonkatsu. Cutlet curry. Cutlet. The library doesn't seem too complex (except for the many unknown imports), I might try to port it to JS at some point

wodenokoto 6y ago
Similar critique was heavily featured during Polm's announcement of cutlet on HN. I never quite understood the reasoning either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23800805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23800805
- numpad0 6y ago
  It's natural though. I could probably say romanization is a casual, reasonable effort method to convey a word so that the both sides can agree on the word in the source language with reasonable accuracy. Uncommon/novel/excessive romanizations like "katsukaree" or "hakkar nywusu" can be technically correct or more precise, but if they can't be traced to the word or concept at less effort for an average audience than "cutlet curry" or "hacker news", they actually serve the purpose less. For real world uses, Google Search[1] in Japanese for "cutlet curry" gives me an info panel for cutlet, a dictionary page as top result, as well as multiple Japanese videos about cutlet curry(why would anyone take and upload that kinds of videos is a mystery to me). In contrast, for "katsukaree", it gives me "maybe you meant..." mini panel, and the top three results are an Instagram tag page, English Wikimedia Commons link, and Tripadvisor page for a restaurant in Columbia. I checked the tag results page but none of top or newest posts seemed to be someone from the country. I think it's safe to say "katsukaree" is quite an unpopular expression to native Japanese speakers. [1]: https://imgur.com/jdPZN7m https://imgur.com/jdPZN7m
  - lmm 6y ago
    I don't think anything is gained by saying "Karee", but "katsu curry" will give you better results; it's pretty much a recognised word in English now.
  - franciscop 6y ago
    As a non-native English speaker who lives in Japan and speaks some Japanese (and I'd guesstimate that the majority of foreigners in Japan who speak Japanese aren't fluent in English!) I know what "katsu" is but I would not know for the life of me what "cutlet" means. I even just typed "cutley" and had to look up to correct it! So it's indeed a lot more helpful for me to maintain "katsu" than "cutlet".
polm23 6y ago
cutlet pulls in MeCab, a medium sized C++ library, and at minimum a 250MB dictionary. I think people have run MeCab through emscripten before; you could stick it in an electron app but I wouldn't put it in a browser. More power to you if you can get it working but I think it'd be a big project.
- franciscop 6y ago
  Okay it seems you did the heavy search for me, thanks! Now that I think of it this is not a katakana/hiragana => romaji, this is a full kanji/kana => romaji, so yeah it should not be trivial/small at all.

wodenokoto 6y ago

Similar critique was heavily featured during Polm's announcement of cutlet on HN. I never quite understood the reasoning either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23800805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23800805

numpad0 6y ago
It's natural though. I could probably say romanization is a casual, reasonable effort method to convey a word so that the both sides can agree on the word in the source language with reasonable accuracy. Uncommon/novel/excessive romanizations like "katsukaree" or "hakkar nywusu" can be technically correct or more precise, but if they can't be traced to the word or concept at less effort for an average audience than "cutlet curry" or "hacker news", they actually serve the purpose less. For real world uses, Google Search[1] in Japanese for "cutlet curry" gives me an info panel for cutlet, a dictionary page as top result, as well as multiple Japanese videos about cutlet curry(why would anyone take and upload that kinds of videos is a mystery to me). In contrast, for "katsukaree", it gives me "maybe you meant..." mini panel, and the top three results are an Instagram tag page, English Wikimedia Commons link, and Tripadvisor page for a restaurant in Columbia. I checked the tag results page but none of top or newest posts seemed to be someone from the country. I think it's safe to say "katsukaree" is quite an unpopular expression to native Japanese speakers. [1]: https://imgur.com/jdPZN7m https://imgur.com/jdPZN7m
- lmm 6y ago
  I don't think anything is gained by saying "Karee", but "katsu curry" will give you better results; it's pretty much a recognised word in English now.
- franciscop 6y ago
  As a non-native English speaker who lives in Japan and speaks some Japanese (and I'd guesstimate that the majority of foreigners in Japan who speak Japanese aren't fluent in English!) I know what "katsu" is but I would not know for the life of me what "cutlet" means. I even just typed "cutley" and had to look up to correct it! So it's indeed a lot more helpful for me to maintain "katsu" than "cutlet".

polm23 6y ago

cutlet pulls in MeCab, a medium sized C++ library, and at minimum a 250MB dictionary. I think people have run MeCab through emscripten before; you could stick it in an electron app but I wouldn't put it in a browser. More power to you if you can get it working but I think it'd be a big project.

franciscop 6y ago
Okay it seems you did the heavy search for me, thanks! Now that I think of it this is not a katakana/hiragana => romaji, this is a full kanji/kana => romaji, so yeah it should not be trivial/small at all.