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> now let's try to apply the rules: > hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!) I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wr
by wren6991 4mo ago
> now let's try to apply the rules:
> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)
I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as し on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi".
I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.
- donw 4mo agoUm... 話します is the correct conjugation for 話す, what am I missing here?
- klodolph 4mo agohanasimasu = 話します
- donw 4mo agoI also still don't understand why the author thought this was wrong?
- klodolph 4mo agoBecause the author of the article hasn’t internalized that si is pronounced “shi”, is my guess.
- danabramov 4mo agoThe article literally says: > there is no "si" in the hiragana table, so s_ + (i) = shi. […] this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. […] i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
- klodolph 4mo agoThat’s just false, “si” is in the hiragana table as し. The romanization “si” is /si/ which is pronounced [ɕi] (or [ɕi̥] or some other possibility). This is basic Japanese phonetics. If you fix all the errors that are in the article, at best there is an argument buried here that Hepburn romanization should not be used to teach Japanese to English speakers—but I think that point is really my own argument that I’m making with the fragments of the article that make sense. Romanization can be more consistent with Japanese phonetics or it can be more consistent with English phonetics, and the Hepburn romanization is more consistent with English phonetics, which is why it’s a good choice for English speakers that don’t know Japanese, but a bad choice for English speakers who are trying to learn Japanese.
- danabramov 4mo agoOkay, we’re fighting over definitions here. There is no “si” in Hepburn romanization. I am intentionally using Hepburn romanization in the article. Therefore, in my article “si” is a compile error. You may argue with my choice, or maybe you can argue that referring to cells in Hiragana table solely by my chosen romanization is somehow bad, and I should instead be inconsistent and give the same mora two different romanizations within a single article. Is that what you’re suggesting?
- klodolph 4mo agoFirst, As a basic part of Japanese language education, students are expected to be familiar with different romanization systems. If you ask a student where “si” is in the table, they should be able to find it. If a student says “it’s not in the table” then they’ve failed the lesson or there is something wrong with the teaching material. Second: am I arguing that the choice of using Hepburn here is somehow bad? Yes, that’s correct. I think Hepburn is a bad choice here. A good choice is Nihon-shiki. JSL romanization is also fine.
- danabramov 4mo agoWe’re talking about the same thing but you insist that there is only one angle under which things aren’t confusing. I disagree. That’s fine. The two systems are isomorphic, and I genuinely believe that, given I’ve described every single caveat of Hepburn in the article, I’ve paid my dues for using it. YMMV. I even include the “finding in the table” part. I think I agree that Nihon-shiki and explaining it upfront would’ve made the article more elegant. One constraint I wanted to hit is that a person should be able to read this article with zero knowledge of Japanese, and walk away with being able to conjugate almost every verb to every suffix correctly. This is more of a challenge to myself as a writer than any practical need but hope it shed some light on the choices and the framing. I liked Hepburn because it’s closer to how it sounds. You can imagine I’m using IPA instead if you want.
- nemomarx 4mo agoThere's different romanization systems and English learners usually use Hepburn
- klodolph 4mo agoI think it’s probably a mistake to use Hepburn if you’re learning Japanese, it kinda gets in the way. Either learn kana (which takes what, a week?) or use one of the other romanization systems which maps more cleanly to Japanese orthography
- danabramov 4mo agoIt’s a deliberate choice in the article. I cover every single caveat with it explicitly. I also mention this: > (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
- klodolph 4mo agoThat note isn’t much to go on. I think the choice is not a good one, whether it is deliberate or by accident, it is not a good choice either way. The main caveat to Hepburn is that it’s unsuitable for explaining how Japanese works and it’s unsuitable for learning Japanese—so before you start working on verb conjugations, you pick up kana or one of the romanizations which is more aligned with Japanese. The idea that you “shouldn’t think in romaji” is really “you shouldn’t think in Hepburn”. This is an important distinction! Japanese has a relatively small inventory of phonemes, somewhere around 20 or 22 of them, and they map very neatly to the latin alphabet. But the article doesn’t make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points. IMO, this is kind of like seeing an article about how monads are burritos. Thinking that a monad is a burrito does not help me understand monads. Nomu -> noma-nai / nomi-masu / nome-ru / nomo-u Miru -> mi-nai / mi-masu / mire-ru / miyo-u The ichidan and godan verbs are not assigned different categories because existing scholars of Japanese are just bad at explaining how they work, and you can still understand them just fine in romaji. I put the hyphens above to mark a place where you could think that the verb ends and the common conjugation forms end, and you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the “tricks”—but some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out (are you familiar with miru -> miyou conjugation, or miru -> mirareru?)
- lmm 4mo agoThe author is using an anglicised romaji system and evidently thinking in English, so they think writing 話します as "hanasimasu" is "wrong".
- danabramov 4mo agoI feel like you’re going out of your way to misinterpret the article. As the article says below: > this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table. Then the article includes an exercise that verifies the reader’s understanding. I also included a note: > (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.) Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji, therefore it’s invalid.
- YouMeWeThem 4mo agoThis is pedantic but you're thinking of "romanization", the act of transliterating Japanese with the Roman alphabet (romaji). There are different systems of romanization, most notably Hepburn and Kunrei. In Hepburn shi is correct, in Kunrei si is correct. It sounds like you're saying "si" are not valid characters in the Roman alphabet.
- danabramov 4mo agoOk yea I see what you’re getting at — my terminology was overly narrow. By “romaji” I specially meant “romanization I’ve chosen for this article”. I do offer an explicit note that other romanizations exist, but outside of that note, I tried to stay within a single self-consistent system, so this nuance was lost.
- wzdd 4mo ago"Factual mistake" is a bit harsh, but the missing piece is that there are multiple ways to romanise Japanese; all of them produce "valid Romaji" but only in the particular system being used. Si is how you write し in romaji using the kunrei-shiki romanisation. In the Hepburn romanisation it's shi. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#Differences_among_romanizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#Diffe... .
- JuniperMesos 4mo agoThe Japanese phonological system doesn't allow a /s/ sound to occur before the vowel /i/, the consonant must undergo palatalization and become /ɕ/ (the IPA symbol for the Japanese sh-like sound). Because this is a regular sound rule, the native writing system doesn't have a way to distinguish the nonexistent */si/ sequence from the /ɕi/ sequence that actually occurs, and this is the syllable that hiragana し or katakana シ indicate. In the Hepburn romanization system, which generally tries to be transparent to speakers of English or other European languages, し is romanized as _shi_, because this indicates to English speakers that the /s/ -> /ɕ/ sound change happens. In the Kunrei-siki romanization system, which tries to be more faithful to the distinctions made in the Japanese phonological system, し is romanized as _si_ to be consistent with the other possible syllables _sa_ _su_ _se_ _so_ that begin with the consonant /s/. And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet is a sign that their command of Japanese isn't all that good yet.
- danabramov 4mo ago> And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet I don’t understand where this misunderstanding about my article comes from. I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”. My article uses romaji so this is self-consistent. I am also mentioning that there is an alternative system that would romanize it as “si” but that’s not the one I’m using in my article.
- ponorin 4mo ago> I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”. That is exactly the problem. Japanese doesn't distinguish between 'shi' and 'si', so all you're really gaining by pointing that out is learning how to correctly romanize Japanese, in a single system. Instead of learning the language you're learning how to represent the language in a foreign way. The rule 0 of learning a language is to get rid of the crutches as soon as possible. Use their native writing system (or if they're one of the latin alphabet users, use their pronunciation rule), learn words of the target language using said language, and learn how to formulate concepts with the language rather than translating it from what you already know. Crutches should only be used to get to this point and no more. If you do that, details like 'si' and 'shi' are not even worth mentioning. Romanization methods have their own goals, and rarely is it about facilitating language learning.
- kevin_thibedeau 4mo agoKunrei shiki was abandoned a few months ago.
- wren6991 4mo agoThanks, this was news to me. TIL. I wasn't really going for kunreishiki, more ワープロ, aka "whatever is the least typing to make the desired characters appear". I think typing in IME is how most people actually interact day-to-day with romaji, and I lex "si" and "shi" identically because the difference is usually not important.
- agnishom 4mo agoMany Japanese English speaksers instinctively pronounce si as shi. They say shistem for system, bashic for basic, shix for six, etc
- JuniperMesos 4mo agoYes, this is native speakers of Japanese applying a sound law pervasive in their native language (that the consonant /s/ cannot occur before the vowel /i/ and must turn into a sh sound), and applying it to English, which does not have that sound law and that happily allows /s/ to occur before our /i/-like vowels. An equivalent phenomenon going the other way (at least for American English speakers) is clearly distinguishing また mata "again" and まだ mada "yet" - American English speakers tend to merge /t/ and /d/ in that kind of intervocalic position (think about pronouncing "latter" and "ladder" identically), and it takes deliberate effort to pronounce distinct /t/ and /d/ sounds there in Japanese, where the American English sound law that merges them does not apply.