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> Hepburn has made Japanese more accessible universally given its phonetic nature and relationship to English. It's made Japanese more accessible to English-sp
by lmm 3y ago
> Hepburn has made Japanese more accessible universally given its phonetic nature and relationship to English.
It's made Japanese more accessible to English-speakers, at the cost of making it less accessible to those from other languages, and making romanised Japanese harder for Japanese people to write, and perhaps even indirectly impeding Japanese learning of English (which is notoriously terrible) as well. This is perhaps a good tradeoff for tourist-oriented materials, but I'm sad to see it becoming the standard.
> As a result, many Chinese people take on Westernized names to avoid the inevitable butchering, which is a bit of a shame.
Plenty of Japanese names are also butchered, whichever romanisation system you use. E.g. "Abe" is romanized that way in either system; "Mazda" and "Ohtani" are deliberately romanized "wrong" (again under either system) for English speakers to mangle them less. IMO taking up a name that's natural in the culture you're operating ends up better for everyone. (I very happily use a Japanese name in Japan rather than trying to get Japanese people to pronounce my birth name).
- baerrie 3y agoHow is it harder for non-English speakers? Knowing the kana pronunciation for Sinzyuku is way harder than knowing the English pronunciation of Shinjuku for most outside of JP. Also, JP schools already teach English from grade 1 onward so if anything, seeing the English transliteration aligns way better and enforces what they are already being taught. Not to mention katakana spellings and pronunciation which further confuse their learning of English. Previously you effectively had three different representations of foreign words with different spellings, this cuts it down to two which significantly decreases the cognitive overload
- lmm 3y ago> How is it harder for non-English speakers? Knowing the kana pronunciation for Sinzyuku is way harder than knowing the English pronunciation of Shinjuku for most outside of JP. Only if they're English speakers! If your only language is e.g. Irish then writing that sound as "Shi" is more confusing than writing it as "Si". > Not to mention katakana spellings and pronunciation which further confuse their learning of English. Previously you effectively had three different representations of foreign words with different spellings, this cuts it down to two which significantly decreases the cognitive overload Maybe. Or maybe the way Hepburn creates "blurred" words that are partially English and partially Japanese causes more confusion than having a clear distinction between written English and written Japanese words that makes it easier to pronounce each one in the way appropriate to that language (i.e. fully code-switch as fluent bilingual people do).
- baerrie 3y agoYeah those are fair points. I still think that to encourage wider learning and understanding from foreigners, using English as a base model makes sense because it is most widely taught across the world. As far as the second point, I taught English in Japan and found that while English education starts at an extremely young age, their relative skill is pretty low compared to other countries that do the same. There are a couple of reasons for this but I think further integration of English pronunciation could help in this department while also appealing to the widest swathe of tourists possible. Another funny thing I’ve found is that the romaji JP iphone keyboard autofills kana and kanji best with hepburn inputs
- numpad0 3y agoKun-rei has a learning cost and no one is paying for it. Hepburn or its close-enough "Ohtani" analogue is free due to (notoriously bad)compulsory English training as well as use of Romaji input on computers, and technical rule conformance to actual Hepburn is never questioned so it wins. I don't know, I think the real sad part is that everyone knows the casual Hepburn from Romaji popularity; Kana shall be default from a nationalistic, purist, standpoint. Mazda and Ohtani are fine, certainly better than Zhang and Nguyen situation, which are supposed to be pronounced "chan" and "gwen" but being mostly sources of confusion.