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.
"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... .
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’d normally be with you and I call this out as a concern purists would have my article. I’m doing something differently here and maybe more daring — the conceit of this article is that you can learn the entire system in one evening with no prior knowledge of Japanese at all. In that case I think the “s_ + i = shi” is as fine a pedagogical moment as any to introduce why the hiragana table matters. And for readers who already know it, I assume they won’t actually have a problem following the content, setting aside the pedantism and the annoyance at someone seemingly “teaching in English” and “copypasting concepts”. Like I get what you’re saying, I just think that it’s okay to break the rules for what I’m going for here.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Okay, 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?
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
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.)
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?)
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.
I think "a week" is slightly optimistic, but I also think "a month" is slightly pessimistic. When I learned hiragana, I spent my free time drilling on RealKana [0]. I'd focus on a new column of the kana table, then bring in columns I'd already practiced, until eventually I could flash reliably on cards drawn from the entire table. This legitimately didn't take much longer than a week, because learning a single column in isolation is very quick, and the real difficulty comes in distinguishing similar kana (as you say). But I was able to drill similar kana by selecting two or three kana that would force me to see them often. (I still struggle slightly with wa, re, and ne, but I definitely know them.)
I also drilled on a drag-n-drop kana table [1] in a few ways -- sometimes I'd start from the kana and try to figure out where they should go in the table, and sometimes I'd go along rows or columns in the table and try to find the kana that belong there. These two directions drill both recognition and recollection.
Proper pronunciation is a cross-cutting concern. As a whole, it's not something you can reasonably learn solely from kana, but the aspects that are relevant are not difficult to pick up. Every kana breaks into one (vowels and N) or two (the rest) phonemes, and for the most part, the way you pronounce those phonemes is consistent across rows and columns of the table (admitting exceptions like "shi" and "tsu"). If you are taught those basics, learning how to pronounce kana is not hard. Training your ear to "hear" distinctions among English allophones, and to distinguish pitch accent from the more familiar stress accent, is much harder, and really has to come from experience, not just kana.
It takes a week to learn the system and to know the existence of at least all the hiragana characters and memorize the sound of some of them.
It takes two weeks to know know the existence of all the kana characters (including katakana), to memorize the sound of enough of them to read some words, and to write some of them.
After a month you should have easily memorized the sound of all of them (maybe a rare one like ム slips by occasionally), be able to write most of them, and be able to read (albeit slowly) anything written in kana.