Many who study Japanese, probably prefer the current official system. It more closely reflects Japanese kana spellings. There are multiple ways of writing sy

Many who study Japanese, probably prefer the current official system. It more closely reflects Japanese kana spellings. There are multiple ways of writing syllables like "ji" in Japanese and that's why there are multiple ways of writing it in nihonshiki romanization. There are variants of Hepburn that have the same property, but few actually write it strictly - even long vowel sounds may not be shown. Reminds me of Mandarin romanization. Pinyin is quite logical for Mandarin speakers, and students studying the language, but misleading if you just approach it assuming English sound values. The system more closely adapted to English (Wade-Giles romanization) as actually used (no one bothers with all those apostrophes) effectively ignores a bunch of important distinctions in Mandarin. In practice, romanization is trying to achieve two separate goals. The two goals are mutually incompatible, or at least largely work against each other. One goal is to accurately transliterate the language according to its own internal logic. It might mirror aspects of the language's writing system, carefully distinguish between all possible sounds in that language, and it might use morphemes as the language's speakers think about them. For example, a hypothetical romanization of English might always use the letter z to write plurals, even though the actual sound varies from z ~ s depending on environment. This regularity is useful for learners of the language, for academic study, and so on. The other goal is to make it pronounceable to someone who doesn't speak the language in question. When done for a linguistic audience, this is universally done with the International Phonetic Alphabet. But there is no commonly agreed upon way of representing any other language's sounds in English spelling. And so people end up using transliteration systems - often really complicated ones intended for specialist use - when what they really want is a simplified phonetic transcription, something that tells you how to approximately pronounce the word.