As someone intimately familiar with this topic, the article here is mostly correct but gets a lot of the small details wrong.
Probably the most important missing part here is the reason non-Hepburn systems like Kunrei stuck around for so long: they were designed to replace the Japanese script completely. This sounds outlandish today, but they were invented during the early Meiji years when Japan was adopting Western innovations and abandoning ancient traditions at breakneck speed. And because their target was thus Japanese people, not foreigners, they didn't need to worry about English phonology.
Incidentally, the Chinese pinyin system was also designed to replace Chinese writing, and Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution. Which also explains why it uses letters like x, c and q in ways that English readers find wildly unintuitive.
It is remarkable that some countries actually have switched writing systems in modern times. Turkey did it in the 1920s after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, for example (replaces an Arabic alphabet with a Roman one).
Not to mention numerous ex-Soviet countries have replaced their Cyrillic system for Latin ones to demonstrate their independence from Russian colonialism.
Japanese as it currently exists is just really hard to read when written without kanji. A couple reasons: it has TONS of homophones, and it doesn't use spaces, and also it has lots of common words that are only 1 or 2 characters long. So if you're parsing a stream of kana, in the general case there will be several different ways to interpret the next couple characters and you'll constantly be backtracking.
So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning.
This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia.
The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on.
The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
Korean could serve as a point of comparison, as modern Korean is written mostly without Chinese characters (you could mix them in if you really want to, but approximately nobody bothers), but it does have spaces between words. And yes, when you have a highly inflecting language, "where do the spaces go" is a very nontrivial problem.
It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.
Well the "native syllabary" is derived from Chinese characters, it's not something that was there and then Chinese characters were shoehorned in later.
I think at some early point most Japanese learners (that don't already know a Chinese language) think kanji should be dropped. And at a later point I think most would change their mind as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
I don't know if this is from the perspective of having learned Mandarin in elementary school first or if Japanese folks feel similarly, but reading words like, e.g., だいがくいんせい versus 大学院生 is actually a little more annoying because I have to scan more of the line to read the word in question. This is notwithstanding the effect that hiragana has in highlighting grammatical structures; it's a lot like setting off Finnish case endings and verb conjugations in a different color.
At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.
> Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution
This was indeed the Communists’ original plan, but the real story is more interesting. Before taking over the country the plan was to replace characters with a pinyin-like system Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] and a whole generation in the north was taught to read this. After 1949, Mao was talked out of Romanization by none other than Stalin, who told him the Chinese language deserves its own script. Pinyin was designed after that, officially as a teaching tool, but probably by people who secretly still believed in more radical writing reform.
> Kunreisiki is also better for serious Japanese learners as it greatly simplifies the description of Japanese grammar: cf. matu/matte/matimasu (all with the same verb stem mat-) vs. Hepburn matsu/matte/machimasu (with 3 different verb stems)."
This is a silly argument because anyone learning Japanese is going to need to learn how to pronounce it anyway. Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.
Absolutely agree. Romaji was absolutely pointless for me and probably a detriment overall to learning a language. Japanese uses consonant + vowel pairs as a rule, and the faster you train your intuition for this, the better.
Remembering both Hiragana and Katakana took me no more than a day each. Although I have to admit that I already tried learning them around 5 years ago and gave up back then out of lack of motivation.
The pair is something of a simplification, and romaji makes certain things in the language more obvious. Like the good old mat-u -> mat-anai, mat-imasu, mat-eru. Added the hyphen to make it clearer, but this hyphen splits a kana neatly in half. The stem is “mat” but you can’t write the stem using kana (in some sense of the word ‘stem’, maybe that’s not the correct word and there’s a different word for it, I’m not a linguist).
I’m not trying to say you should avoid kana, just that there is some amount of intuition you can develop with romaji that does not work in kana.
The traditional way to develop a similar intuition with a kana-only approach is to think of it as "moving across the row" in the kana table, which works fine. I think the fact that with romaji we can represent the stem as mat- is interesting and valuable in a theoretical sense but not all that useful to a learner.
Have you considered that different things are difficult for different people? Learning hiragana and katakana has taken me about a month, and I found it very difficult. There is no need to make it prerequisite for starting to learn grammar, forming sentences, or pronunciation.
Notice how I didn't say that I "learned" both in a day, I "remembered" them. Of course actual learning will take some time, especially with less used characters.
But remembering shapes and differentiating between them using mnemonics should not be too hard for most people.
> Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.
I think the exception is people using the JSL textbooks :) there is a reasonable defense to using JSL. But you’re right. I think it’s indefensible to teach Hepburn to people interested in learning Japanese.
"…久保 becomes "Kubo" without the long vowel marked at all…" -- there is no long vowel! Just plain Kubo is correct.
"Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki optimize for a systematic, one-to-one mapping between kana and romanization. One kana, one romanization, always, with no exceptions."
(Kunrei-shiki: exceptions! 猫は庭へ魚を運ぶ Neko wa niwa e sakana o hakobu)
Also: "Romanization is a scaffold, not a destination." ? I TOO AM A HUMAN WRITER WHO WRITES WITH MY OWN FINGERS.
But the history of the Romaji movement is indeed interesting - there were influential people who were quite serious about moving entirely to romaji at one point! It would have changed everything.
If any aspiring Japanese learners read this, forget this article. Just start learning hiragana/katakana from the get-go. You’re going to have to eventually, assuming you want read anything (and anything worth reading certainly won’t be written in romaji). But beyond that, you want to start breaking down your instinctual pronunciations and biases that appear when reading letters you know, so that you can more accurately and efficiently learn the correct pronunciations.
This is unnecessarily pedantic advice, and I encourage fellow learners of Japanese to ignore it. You will definitely need to learn hiragana and katakana but you can do it at your own pace, and it is orthogonal to learning the basics of grammar, forming sentences, and pronunciation, so you definitely don't need to think of it as an obstacle. For pronunciation in particular, obviously watching Japanese movies etc helps. And yes, I have a native Japanese teacher who recommends the same.
Maybe the subset of japanese content I'm exposed to is biased, but personally I encounter doubled vowels (obaasan) more often than macron vowels (obāsan). The latter is explicitly "modified hepburn romanization". Even if the latter is more common in general, it's worth noting that the former is the original. The article seems to say that the former is weird and nonstandard, which afaik is completely false.
Also, the particles は を へ aren't always romanized the way they're pronounced; I can think of several places I've seen を written as wo despite being used as a particle.
Using doubled vowels instead of diacritics is just one more concession to Americans, who are unfamiliar with the use of diacritics and whose software frequently does not work correctly when text contains characters with diacritics.
Hepburn is an inappropriate method of writing Japanese, which nonetheless has become the dominant way of writing Japanese, just because it caters to the inability of most Americans to learn how other languages than English are written and pronounced.
Minor correction on the article: Kunrei-shiki doesn't have a 1-to-1 mapping between kana and letters. You can see that directly in the table they show. Only Nihon-shiki does. Kunrei-shiki is the worst of both worlds.
That's why Nihon-shiki is and will likely always remain the best system for serious students of Japanese - if you even need it at all. But then again, if you're just starting out, the best place to start is usually to immediately start learning kana.
This is interesting but as always these days the slop effect just makes it feel like I'm reading Claude which sucks too much and makes me not want to read this. Sad face.
Add to that, that this is content marketing, and the whole thing really collapses. I'll consume interesting content marketing, I may even consume interesting slop, but I can't consume slop content marketing.
I'm surprised that articles like this that are pretty clearly AI-generated get any sort of traction here. Is it because people think the topic is interesting but don't actually care about the content?
> Three Japanese words, three Hepburn transcriptions. The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like.
AI slop aside, everybody seems to talk about romanization exclusively from the perspective of Japanese learners, while the biggest problem with Kunrei-shiki and Nihon-shiki is how they've been sabotaging Japanese people's ability to learn and pronounce English correctly.
Hepburn is anglocentric and that makes perfect sense given how deeply embedded English is in modern Japanese.
As someone intimately familiar with this topic, the article here is mostly correct but gets a lot of the small details wrong.
Probably the most important missing part here is the reason non-Hepburn systems like Kunrei stuck around for so long: they were designed to replace the Japanese script completely. This sounds outlandish today, but they were invented during the early Meiji years when Japan was adopting Western innovations and abandoning ancient traditions at breakneck speed. And because their target was thus Japanese people, not foreigners, they didn't need to worry about English phonology.
Incidentally, the Chinese pinyin system was also designed to replace Chinese writing, and Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution. Which also explains why it uses letters like x, c and q in ways that English readers find wildly unintuitive.
It is remarkable that some countries actually have switched writing systems in modern times. Turkey did it in the 1920s after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, for example (replaces an Arabic alphabet with a Roman one).
Not to mention numerous ex-Soviet countries have replaced their Cyrillic system for Latin ones to demonstrate their independence from Russian colonialism.
What surprises me (only a little) is that Japan continues to use Chinese characters when they've got a perfectly good native syllabary.
Japanese as it currently exists is just really hard to read when written without kanji. A couple reasons: it has TONS of homophones, and it doesn't use spaces, and also it has lots of common words that are only 1 or 2 characters long. So if you're parsing a stream of kana, in the general case there will be several different ways to interpret the next couple characters and you'll constantly be backtracking.
So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning.
This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia.
The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on.
The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
Korean could serve as a point of comparison, as modern Korean is written mostly without Chinese characters (you could mix them in if you really want to, but approximately nobody bothers), but it does have spaces between words. And yes, when you have a highly inflecting language, "where do the spaces go" is a very nontrivial problem.
It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.
Well the "native syllabary" is derived from Chinese characters, it's not something that was there and then Chinese characters were shoehorned in later.
I think at some early point most Japanese learners (that don't already know a Chinese language) think kanji should be dropped. And at a later point I think most would change their mind as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
I don't know if this is from the perspective of having learned Mandarin in elementary school first or if Japanese folks feel similarly, but reading words like, e.g., だいがくいんせい versus 大学院生 is actually a little more annoying because I have to scan more of the line to read the word in question. This is notwithstanding the effect that hiragana has in highlighting grammatical structures; it's a lot like setting off Finnish case endings and verb conjugations in a different color.
At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.
> Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution
This was indeed the Communists’ original plan, but the real story is more interesting. Before taking over the country the plan was to replace characters with a pinyin-like system Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] and a whole generation in the north was taught to read this. After 1949, Mao was talked out of Romanization by none other than Stalin, who told him the Chinese language deserves its own script. Pinyin was designed after that, officially as a teaching tool, but probably by people who secretly still believed in more radical writing reform.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinxua_Sin_Wenz
Highly recommend on this subject John DeFrancis' "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" (1984)!
https://archive.org/details/chineselanguagef0000defr/
> Kunreisiki is also better for serious Japanese learners as it greatly simplifies the description of Japanese grammar: cf. matu/matte/matimasu (all with the same verb stem mat-) vs. Hepburn matsu/matte/machimasu (with 3 different verb stems)."
This is a silly argument because anyone learning Japanese is going to need to learn how to pronounce it anyway. Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.
Absolutely agree. Romaji was absolutely pointless for me and probably a detriment overall to learning a language. Japanese uses consonant + vowel pairs as a rule, and the faster you train your intuition for this, the better.
Remembering both Hiragana and Katakana took me no more than a day each. Although I have to admit that I already tried learning them around 5 years ago and gave up back then out of lack of motivation.
The pair is something of a simplification, and romaji makes certain things in the language more obvious. Like the good old mat-u -> mat-anai, mat-imasu, mat-eru. Added the hyphen to make it clearer, but this hyphen splits a kana neatly in half. The stem is “mat” but you can’t write the stem using kana (in some sense of the word ‘stem’, maybe that’s not the correct word and there’s a different word for it, I’m not a linguist).
I’m not trying to say you should avoid kana, just that there is some amount of intuition you can develop with romaji that does not work in kana.
The traditional way to develop a similar intuition with a kana-only approach is to think of it as "moving across the row" in the kana table, which works fine. I think the fact that with romaji we can represent the stem as mat- is interesting and valuable in a theoretical sense but not all that useful to a learner.
Have you considered that different things are difficult for different people? Learning hiragana and katakana has taken me about a month, and I found it very difficult. There is no need to make it prerequisite for starting to learn grammar, forming sentences, or pronunciation.
If you want to learn pronunciation you should be listening to audio.
Sure, maybe don’t force people to learn kana first. But Hepburn is kind of the worst of all worlds, it is just a waste of time to learn Hepburn.
Notice how I didn't say that I "learned" both in a day, I "remembered" them. Of course actual learning will take some time, especially with less used characters. But remembering shapes and differentiating between them using mnemonics should not be too hard for most people.
> Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.
I think the exception is people using the JSL textbooks :) there is a reasonable defense to using JSL. But you’re right. I think it’s indefensible to teach Hepburn to people interested in learning Japanese.
Yes, several things are just wrong here, e.g.
"…久保 becomes "Kubo" without the long vowel marked at all…" -- there is no long vowel! Just plain Kubo is correct.
"Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki optimize for a systematic, one-to-one mapping between kana and romanization. One kana, one romanization, always, with no exceptions." (Kunrei-shiki: exceptions! 猫は庭へ魚を運ぶ Neko wa niwa e sakana o hakobu)
Also: "Romanization is a scaffold, not a destination." ? I TOO AM A HUMAN WRITER WHO WRITES WITH MY OWN FINGERS.
But the history of the Romaji movement is indeed interesting - there were influential people who were quite serious about moving entirely to romaji at one point! It would have changed everything.
If any aspiring Japanese learners read this, forget this article. Just start learning hiragana/katakana from the get-go. You’re going to have to eventually, assuming you want read anything (and anything worth reading certainly won’t be written in romaji). But beyond that, you want to start breaking down your instinctual pronunciations and biases that appear when reading letters you know, so that you can more accurately and efficiently learn the correct pronunciations.
This is unnecessarily pedantic advice, and I encourage fellow learners of Japanese to ignore it. You will definitely need to learn hiragana and katakana but you can do it at your own pace, and it is orthogonal to learning the basics of grammar, forming sentences, and pronunciation, so you definitely don't need to think of it as an obstacle. For pronunciation in particular, obviously watching Japanese movies etc helps. And yes, I have a native Japanese teacher who recommends the same.
Maybe the subset of japanese content I'm exposed to is biased, but personally I encounter doubled vowels (obaasan) more often than macron vowels (obāsan). The latter is explicitly "modified hepburn romanization". Even if the latter is more common in general, it's worth noting that the former is the original. The article seems to say that the former is weird and nonstandard, which afaik is completely false.
Also, the particles は を へ aren't always romanized the way they're pronounced; I can think of several places I've seen を written as wo despite being used as a particle.
Using doubled vowels instead of diacritics is just one more concession to Americans, who are unfamiliar with the use of diacritics and whose software frequently does not work correctly when text contains characters with diacritics.
Hepburn is an inappropriate method of writing Japanese, which nonetheless has become the dominant way of writing Japanese, just because it caters to the inability of most Americans to learn how other languages than English are written and pronounced.
Minor correction on the article: Kunrei-shiki doesn't have a 1-to-1 mapping between kana and letters. You can see that directly in the table they show. Only Nihon-shiki does. Kunrei-shiki is the worst of both worlds.
That's why Nihon-shiki is and will likely always remain the best system for serious students of Japanese - if you even need it at all. But then again, if you're just starting out, the best place to start is usually to immediately start learning kana.
This is interesting but as always these days the slop effect just makes it feel like I'm reading Claude which sucks too much and makes me not want to read this. Sad face.
Add to that, that this is content marketing, and the whole thing really collapses. I'll consume interesting content marketing, I may even consume interesting slop, but I can't consume slop content marketing.
I'm surprised that articles like this that are pretty clearly AI-generated get any sort of traction here. Is it because people think the topic is interesting but don't actually care about the content?
> Three Japanese words, three Hepburn transcriptions. The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like.
I mean come on.
Detecting AI writing is a skill that not everyone has.
> The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like
So… letters?
AI slop aside, everybody seems to talk about romanization exclusively from the perspective of Japanese learners, while the biggest problem with Kunrei-shiki and Nihon-shiki is how they've been sabotaging Japanese people's ability to learn and pronounce English correctly. Hepburn is anglocentric and that makes perfect sense given how deeply embedded English is in modern Japanese.