by Reiko Yukawa

Created on: January 19, 2007   Last Updated: September 17, 2009

Romanization is used often for writing out lyrics to Japanese songs, because lyrics are the most common text for non-Japanese-speakers to want to pronounce properly. This is actually somewhat possible because Japanese is a very simple language to pronounce, once you know a few basic rules, with almost no irregularities. Even for someone that doesn't understand a word of Japanese, singing along to a song in the language is relatively easy given the transliteration of the lyrics. This is a favorite pastime for many of those interested in Japanese culture, partially because of the near-obsession with karaoke as a social activity among the Japanese themselves. But that could be a whole separate article.

This article is written primarily for Japanese students, but as a brief introduction for those who haven't studied the language, Japanese uses three writing systems: hiragana, a phonetic syllabary used primarily for particles and inflections; katakana, another syllabary used for foreign words and emphasis, exactly corresponding to hiragana; and kanji, Chinese characters used for many meaningful words. Each kana syllable is a combination of a consonant and a vowel, or a vowel by itself, so for the most part, Japanese can be written out exactly as it sounds. Notable exceptions are long vowels, doubled consonants, particles, and a few specific sounds that don't exist in Japanese as they would normally be written due to the particular combination of consonant and vowel. These exceptions are where the differences between different methods occur.

There are several different official methods of romanizing Japanese text, which are used in different contexts. I won't go into the details of the different methods here. To romanize well, you don't need to know the differences between Hepburn and Kunrei, for instance. If you know what those are, what I will describe from my experience of years of romanization is basically an extra-modified Hepburn system, where the extra modifications are for the benefit of non-Japanese-speakers trying to pronounce Japanese words.

For place names, foreigners have become accustomed to writing such things as Tokyo and Osaka, but because these spellings ignore long vowels, spelling them as they are actually pronounced in Japanese would look very strange. (It's more correctly Toukyou and Oosaka, if you were curious.) But for text that is meant to be pronounced correctly, long vowels should be spelled as written, meaning long 'o' is 'ou.' This is only

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