Quote:
Originally Posted by anrakushi
first of all this thread is for Japanese learners who should have knowledge of Japanese phono-tactics. people "without knowledge of Japanese phonotactics (sic)" are probably going to read it as 'tat su' and even then it will be accented to their own languages way to pronounce ta and su sounds. sigh..
here is an example how romaji is ridiculous for learners of Japanese to rely on for pronunciation. MMM who is great at Japanese explained for his American accent etc how to pronounce 可愛い and how it conflicts with an Australian accent. he said か sounds like the first syllable in cotton, but for Australians the first syllable of cotton sounds like こ in Japanese. he explained わ is like Washington but in Aust. we say Washington as a 'wo' sound, not at all like わ in Japanese. I do agree however with his explanation for 'いい' in my accent's pronunciation of English. hopefully this makes the faults of relying on romaji for pronunciation clear. in fact in this case if MMM or someone else with that American accent, was to publish a book based on how to pronounce the Japanese sounds and it was brought to Australia (like many text books are) Australians would be pronouncing Japanese quite wrong just from these couple of examples.
I see the only purpose for knowing romaji is as a way of inputting Japanese into a computer and that is the only reason i learnt romaji. I learnt it after i had already learnt to pronounce and write 平仮名、片仮名 and had started learning 漢字. it is NOT necessary for someone to learn romaji to pronounce Japanese. It IS necessary for them to have a native or equal speaker to show them the pronunciation.
lets continue, a nice easy word you should all know:
生花 ー いけばな ー flower arrangement.
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I don't DISagree with you. As a learner of the language, I wish my textbook would present more things in Hiragana and that my sensei would stop writing romaji on the board.
But for people that aren't learning the language, just for whatever reason are in a situation where they must read a Japanese transliterated word, I believe that romanizations should be done phonemically relative to the IPA*. Since "tu" isn't a phoneme of Japanese, I don't believe we should use it.
Even if someone pronounced the t and s as seperate sounds, they would still be closer to the real sound--especially since in English we do have that sound (its), if not as a phoneme. I don't think that would be a problem, though. I'd be more worried about the pronunciation of words like Toyota and Hyundai (which I think are inescapable, really...).
*When I say that, I don't mean a phonetic transcription using IPA symbols. I mean that under the IPA, [a] is known by everyone to indicate the /a/ in AE "father" or BE/AusE "da" (like dad) (The A in my screen name is pronounced this way.), etc.
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るつぼ rutsubo melting pot