[wren6991]

> 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.

[agnishom]

Many Japanese English speaksers instinctively pronounce si as shi. They say shistem for system, bashic for basic, shix for six, etc

[JuniperMesos]

Yes, 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.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Kunrei shiki was abandoned a few months ago.

[wren6991]

Thanks, 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.

[donw]

Um... 話します is the correct conjugation for 話す, what am I missing here?

[lmm]

The 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]

I 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.

[wzdd]

"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#Diffe... .

[asutekku]

Kunrei has been deprecated, Hepburn is the official one even the government of Japan recommends these days and matches better the pronunciation of the language.

[numpad0]

But nobody cares about formal romanization rules in the first place. People have informal bastardizations of Hepburn that's consistent enough for typing, and Kunrei deprecation is more or less just admission of the status quo.

[danabramov]

I see, maybe my use of “romaji” is sloppy because I implied “Hepburn romaji” specifically because that’s what I chose in the article. I do explicitly mention that other romanizations exist and that I chose not to use them — so I’m not worried about misleading someone who reads the article. But on pedantic level I see why “si doesn’t exist” sounds overly broad.

[presentation]

I think also that anyone who's spoken Japanese for a while already has internalized that "si" === "shi" because there literally isn't the sound "si" in modern Japanese, as the other commenters mentioned it's often romanized both as "si" and "shi" in daily life, if you typed "si" into a keyboard it renders し, it goes on. The original comment on this thread includes one such person who literally didn't follow why "si" is wrong, and I felt the same way too as a long-time Japanese learner. It's a very "copy paste Western language concepts onto Japanese" way of conceptualizing the language, which is IMO a great way to set oneself up for great struggles when trying to learn a language that is structurally different, because it's not the right mental model.

[YouMeWeThem]

This 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]

Ok 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.

[lmm]

> I feel like you’re going out of your way to misinterpret the article.

Nope. You correct yourself after, sure, but what I wrote is how it came across at the time when reading.

> Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji

No, that's not what "romaji" means. If you mean Hepburn, say Hepburn. And if you don't know the difference, that's a sign to learn more before presuming to teach others.

[danabramov]

I’ve already conceded in sibling comments that saying “romaji” to mean “Hepburn romaji” specifically is technically imprecise. Note I still do explicitly mention other romanization systems, want to stay consistent within the article, and don’t want to overload the reader with terminology. My motivation here is that realistically that’s the romaji you’re going to be exposed to the most as a learner. At least that’s been my experience.

As for “correcting” myself, yes, I expect the reader invested in arguing online to also be able to follow more than a single paragraph of text. I think it’s fine that you stumbled there as that paragraph wasn’t for you. I don’t think I’ve hurt your understanding of Japanese this way.

The only people confused by that paragraph are people who already learned kana or correct pronunciation (or both). That paragraph isn’t for them.

[lmm]

> I’ve already conceded in sibling comments that saying “romaji” to mean “Hepburn romaji” specifically is technically imprecise. Note I still do explicitly mention other romanization systems, want to stay consistent within the article, and don’t want to overload the reader with terminology. My motivation here is that realistically that’s the romaji you’re going to be exposed to the most as a learner.

It's not just a technicality. "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" is not just sloppy but outright misleading, as though "si" and "tu" were somehow not romaji.

[klodolph]

hanasimasu = 話します

[donw]

I also still don't understand why the author thought this was wrong?

[klodolph]

Because the author of the article hasn’t internalized that si is pronounced “shi”, is my guess.

[danabramov]

The 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]

That’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.

[nemomarx]

There's different romanization systems and English learners usually use Hepburn

[klodolph]

I 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]

It’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.)

[imtringued]

I've never understood how people can claim that learning kana takes a week. It clearly takes more time than that, considering how similar some of the symbols are and a lot of them only differ by double dashes or a stroke (think nu vs me, ne vs re, ro vs ru, chi vs sa, and so on). Then there are the combinations and even if you managed to learn hiragana, you still have to learn katakana.

Oh and I forgot, you have to actually learn how to listen, pronounce and speak them, not just learn a useless romanization mapping. I've heard way too many English speakers just say the romanization with English pronunciation. At that point their learning efforts turn into self sabotage.

In total that's definitively a month of effort, albeit spread out over the first year of learning.

[JuniperMesos]

The 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]

> 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]

> 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.

[danabramov]

I am literally saying in the article:

> this is actually completely intentional. some purists may dislike that, but [..] i think it provides a much clearer intuition for Japanese verb conjugation than writing it in hiragana.

You are that purist that I’m talking about. I get your argument. I just think it’s a non-issue in my chosen pedagogical approach to convey what I wanted to move on. People unaware of how romanization works will nod at it and move on. People aware of it will not have issue with it. People with opinions about proper way to teach the language are the ones that will get stuck on this.

The article is engineer-brained. It’s for people like me. It’s not for the people you’re teaching, assuming these strong opinions come from you being a teacher.

[alper]

It's unbelievable what lengths people will go to to hate on this. The article is good, I learned a bunch of stuff and was putting off verb conjugation for a while now.