> Less well-understood is why “place effects” matter so much for smoking (and mortality) for those without a college degree.
Let me take a crack at it: people with college degrees tend to be found in populous places and spaces where smoking is prohibited. Plus, social pressure; lighting up a cigarette in certain company is almost like hurling a racist insult.
Just to get through college with a cigarette habit would have been a pain in the ass. You can't be darting outside N times during lectures or exams to have a smoke. If you can even do that; a lot of colleges nowadays have even outdoor smoking bans, no? That's sort of a place effect: college graduates spend a bunch of time in certain places where smoking would have been inconvenient to the point of making some people quit.
Your argument as it stands would explain why people with college degrees smoke a lot less than people without them. But that's not what the "place effects" is in the article. "Place effects" is the fact that, if we just look at non-college-graduates, the ones who live in rural areas smoke more and have lower life expectancy than the ones who live in urban areas.
The latter effect, I think, can be explained by an argument that's similar to yours: even for non-college graduates, it's a lot more inconvenient to be a smoker in urban areas than in rural areas. You're much more likely to find smoking banned inside the places you go, and to face social disapproval if you try to smoke outdoors in public spaces.
What eras? I went to college in a non-populous place circa ~2001-2005 and in our state smoking bans were just starting to roll out then. Smoking was an everyone thing, and it was normal to go to smokey places on a regular basis even if you didn't smoke. That was nuts and bad of course, but it was normalized.
Plotting imaginary numbers on a separate axis from real numbers to create a plane is an obvious idea. Got another dimension, add another axis, right?
The rotation pops out from the binomial multiplication of real + imaginary pairs:
(a + ib) (c + id).
And the way that is done is nothing new: it follows the same old FOIL rule: ac + iad + ibc + i^2bd. Where i^2 gives us -1 so we get ac - bd + i(ad + bc).
When you plot a few points on the complex plane and try multiplying them with the above, you will soon discover that their arguments (i.e. angles) are adding together, and you can then prove that with some basic trig.
For instance if you multiply together any points that are both 30 degrees off the real axis, you get a point that is 60 degrees, and so on.
You can completely removce the "i" from the picture and just have the multiplication rule as <a, b> x <c, d> = <ac - bc, ad + bc>, and then see what happens when you convert to polar coordinates.
You can connect that to linear agebra, in which rotation of a vector is achieved by multiplication by a suitable matrix (and in connection to the above, such a rotation matrix will have some complex eigenvalues; real ones correspond to scaling/shearing).
Any tech for predicting people's behavior will likely be sooner mature in predicting the behavior of crowds of people than one individual. (They seem like related problems where the latter is much harder.) The easier one is where the $$$ incentives lie, e.g. if you correctly predict how masses of people are going to buy stocks, you're rich.
If you eliminate the odd integers from consideration, you've eliminated an entire class of integers. yet, the set of remaining integers is of the same size as the original.
Programs are not limited; the number of Turing machines is countably infinite.
When you say things like "eliminate a class of bugs", that is played out in the abstraction: an infinite subset of that infinity of machines is eliminated, leaving an infinity.
How you then sample from that infinity in order to have something which fits on your actual machine is a separate question.
How do you count how many bugs a program has? If I replace the Clang code base by a program that always outputs a binary that prints hello world, how many bugs is that? Or if I replace it with a program that exits immediately?
Maybe another example is compiler optimisations: if we say that an optimising compiler is correct if it outputs the most efficient (in number of executed CPU instructions) output program for the every input program, then every optimising compiler is buggy. You can always make it less buggy by making more of the outputs correct, but you can never satisfy the specification on ALL inputs because of undecidability.
Because the number of state where a program can be is so huge (when you consider everything that can influence how a program runs and the context where and when it runs) it is for the current computation power practically infinite but yes it is theoretically finite and can even be calculated.
Out of those people, the only ones with money to blow on software are lawyers.
Most of your target audience does not grok branching, merging, diffs and pull requests.
Google Docs allows for collaborative editing and is free to use. Collaborative as in, as you edit, your collaborators' cursors appear, labeled by their names, and you see their edits in real time in the same document.
Users who know about this are not going to go to diffs, pull requests and merges; they simply don't know the computer science behind why those things would be advantageous.
Texts which are not code are very difficult to branch and merge because you can't just test them to see whether they work. E.g. if two authors take a partially written novel, and continue it in different ways, good luck merging it into one cohesive whole whose plot makes sense.
Maybe with the help of AI it could be pulled off; it could tell you things like why has the chsaracter of Dwight re-appeared in chapter 7, after being killed in chapter 5.
> Correction 16 December: An earlier version of this story incorrectly defined the kind of plasma that Professor Loureiro researched.
If I get shot and someone writes some libelous bullshit about how I worked with hygienic macro systems, someone kindly jump on that shit ASAP. Thanks in advance!
Curiously enough, Hepburn romanization fixes some ambiguities in Japanese (Japanese written in kana alone) while introducing others.
The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity.
Where does Hepburn disambiguate?
In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē). The "SEI" is one unit. But in other situations it does not, like in a compound word ending in the E kana, where the second word starts with I. For instance 酒色 (sake + iro -> sakeiro, not sakēro).
Hepburn distinguishes these; the hiragana spelling does not!
This is one of the issues that makes it very hard to read Japanese that is written with hiragana only, rather than kanji. No word breaks and not knowing whether せい is supposed to be sē or sei.
There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing). A lot of the time it is pronounced as karāge, because of the way RA and A come together. Other times you hear a kind of flutter in it which articulates two A's.
I have no idea which romanization to use. Flip a coin?
> The kara comes from a country name and refers to a style of cooking
My understanding is that the exact etymology is unknown. It's often written with the letter that references the tang dynasty, but the thing is there's no particular reason to think the Chinese introduced the style of cooking to Japan - although it is true that there was such a thing as fried chicken in 7th century China!
Another kanji-ization of the word uses the kara from karate (meaning air or empty, in karate it's "empty hand") and I find this equally plausible as karaage is fried with a very small amount of batter ("in air").
Either way they're both essentially competing "kanji backronyms" seeking to retcon an existing word as spoken; there's no real right or wrong answer.
I somehow always keep forgetting that the kara part is that kanji that looks like the one for sugar without the kome hen.
Still, that sort of thing in general still leaves room for it having been word play. Like tempura being originally from Portuguese, having nothing to do with 天.
Japanese spelling often plays gaslighting head games.
In the phonetic alphabet it's /e:/ vs. /ei/ and /o:/ vs. /ou/.
If you're an English speaker, you can be forgiven for a very stereotypical trait of the English accent. English speakers have a real hard time with the /e/ or /e:/ sounds as well as the /o/ and /o:/ sounds. Most English dialects don't have either a monophthong /e/ or /o/. Both the long and short tend to get heard as /eɪ/ and /oʊ/.
French enchanté /ɑ̃ ʃɑ̃ te/ is heard and borrowed as /ɑn.ʃɑn.teɪ/. German gehen /ge:n/ is heard as "gain" /geɪn/. And Japanese /o:/ and /ou/ both get heard as /oʊ/.
It's arguably a minimal pair in Japanese: 負う /ou/ (to carry), 王 /o:/ (king).
負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though. 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example. I don't really think native speakers still distinguish these.
As a native Japanese speaker, this example is eye-opening. I hadn't even realized that the u in 方 is pronounced as /o:/ — I believe most Japanese people haven't either, despite unknowingly pronounce it that way.
Also, I have no idea how to Hepburn-romanize 方 vs 頬, 負う vs 王, and 塔 vs 遠. If I had to romanize, I would just write it as whatever the romaji input method understands correctly (hou/hoo, ou/ou, and tou/too, in this case).
If you know the word 方, that it is /ho:/, and you know that it has a う in it when written out, how can you not know that う stands for making the o long? The only vowel is the long o.
Japanese kindergarten kids can recognize hiragana words with "おう", correctly identifying it as /o:/. By the time they learn the 方 kanji they would have seen it written in hiragana upmpteen times, like AよりBのほうがいい and whatnot.
Well, speaking for myself, I internalized how う is pronounced differently in different contexts when I was young, and by now I've almost forgotten there's a difference I need to be conscious of.
When I hear /ho:/ in a certain context, "ほう(方)" immediately comes to mind, without noticing that what I heard was a long o. To me it's just the う sound. And if someone pointed to their face while saying /ho:/, I'd think it's the お sound as in "ほお(頬)".
Because they're a native speaker. Native speakers are often utterly oblivious to the 'rules' of their own languages.
Every time I read a rule about my mother tongue (Mandarin) online I was like, lol what nonsense foreigners made up... And then I realize that rule does exist. I just have internalized it for so long.
Adjective order in English is basically that most essential qualities of the object go closest to the head. There are lists out there that try to break this down into categories of adjective ("opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose"), and to some extent the anglo intuitions on which sorts of properties are more or less essential are not trivial, but it's not as arbitrary as people want to make it out to be.
This. People act like it's a hyper-complicated rule that English speakers magically infer, when in reality, a) other languages do it, and b) it's a much simpler rule (that you've given) which someone overcomplicated.
As a counterexample (in line with your explanation), consider someone snarking on the WallStreetBets forum: "Come on, guys, this is supposed to be Wall Street bets, not Wall Street prudent hedges!" Adjective order changes because the intended significance changes. (Normally it would be "prudent Wall Street hedges".)
Side note: please don't nitpick about whether "Wall Street" is functionally an adjective here. The same thing would happen if the forum had been named "FinancialBets".
People "overcomplicate" the rule because they find counterexamples to the simple rule.
It's a fool's errand because the way human language works is that people happily accept odd exceptions by rote memory. So the rule simply says that there exist these exceptions. Also, there is something called euphony: speakers find utterances questionable if they are not in some canonical form they are used to hearing. For instance "black & white" is preferred over "white & black".
The rules boil down to "what people are used to hearing, regardless of the underlying grammar offering other possibilities".
In compound noun phrases, nouns serve as adjective-like modifiers.
By the way, modifying compounds generally must not be plurals, to the extent that even pluralia tantum words like scissors and pants get forced into a pseudo-singular form in order to serve as modifiers, giving us scissor lift and pant leg, which must not be scissors lift and pants leg.
An example of a noun phrase containing many modifying nouns is something like: law school entrance examination grading procedure workflow.
The order among modifying nouns is semantically critical and different from euphonic adjective order; examples in which modifying nouns are permuted, resulting in strange or nonsensical interpretations, or bad grammar, are not valid for demonstrating constraintsa mong the order of true adjectives which independently apply to their subject.
For instance, red, big house is strange and wants to be big, red house. The house is independently big and red.
This is not related to why entrance examination grading procedure cannot be changed to examination entrance grading procedure. The modifiers do not target the head, but each other. "entrance" applies to "examination", not to "procedure" or "grading".
Did you read the second sentence of that paragraph? The same thing would happen with a legit adjective, like if the forum had been named "FinancialBets": "Guys, this is financial bets, not financial prudent hedges."
Could you elaborate on the last sentence? Wiktionary claims they're pronounced the same modulo pitch accent, but Wiktionary's phonetic transcriptions are (mostly?) auto-generated AFAIK.
塔 can be pronounced as tou, too, or somewhere between the two. It depends on the speaker, speaking style, and possibly dialect. Either way, Japanese speakers rely more on context and pitch accent than actual pronunciation, so it communicates fine.
No it can't, unless someone is spelling it out, or singing it in a song where it is given two notes, or just hyper-correcting their speech based on their knowledge of writing.
Annoyed speech and such can break words into their morae for empahsis, which breaks up dipthongs.
E.g. angry Japanese five-year-old:
ga kkō ni i ki ta ku nā i!!! (I don't wanna go to school!!!)
"nā i" is not the regular way of saying "nai". The idea that "nai" has that as an alternative pronunciation is a strawman.
You're right. I looked up 現代仮名遣いの告示 [0] for the first time, and it says 塔（とう） is officially pronounced as "too". I had it backwards - I thought that 塔 is "tou", but due to the varying sounds of う, people could (and often preferred to) pronounce it as "too" in everyday speech.
This kind of misconception seems not uncommon. There's an FAQ on NHK's website [1] that addresses the question of whether 言う（いう） is pronounced "iu" or "yuu". The answer is "yuu", and the article make it clear that: "It's not that [iu] is used for polite/careful speech and [yuu] for casual speech - there is no such distinction."
I think native speakers learn words by hearing them and seeing them written in hiragana, before learning the underlying rules, so they know "too" is written as とう, but might not realize that とう shouldn't be pronounced as "tou" or いう as "iu". These are at least less obvious than cases like は in こんにちは never being "ha".
Personally, if I heard someone say 塔 as "tou" or 言う as "iu", I probably wouldn't count it as incorrect, nor would I even notice the phonetic difference.
Oh, I thought the added u and the bar were just two different ways to indicated that the o is stretched (the u looking like a workaround to avoid special characters).
The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact.
Like how many people end up with the same romanized name while being distinct in other alphabets. Then discrepancies between the different systems because they usually are sloppy on the handling of these matters.
Now that most stuff is electronic, these small differences can have wider effects and be a PITA to fix.
> The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact.
Do you have evidence of this? Else, I doubt it. Most official documents will also require your residence address. If you are signing any official documents, they will check your zairyu or My Number card for both photographic similarity, romaji (roman character) spelling of your name, and residence address. All of these in combination can easily uniquely identify a foreign resident in Japan.
You're looking at the checks done by a human. And I'd argue those are already problematic enough, yes I've heard of first hand stories of people stuck at the airport explaining that the spelling on they passport and their reservation name being different. People pay attention on international flights now, but still fall for the other traps. I remember a guy buying concert tickets with the most common spelling and getting stuck at the gate as they had nothing on them matching it.
The worst part is the automated checks, and sure it's a huge PITA. I've spent 1h30 last weekend at a docomo shop to have my name recognized by their system, with the guy looking at the papers and not understanding why it wouldn't do it. That's with near perfect matching between the documents. Imagine having spellings mismatched.
Banks also have a different matching system (Katakana based, with a string length limit, for account matching, and another WTF system for card owner matching), which is screwed in its very own way. That's one of the main reasons for the debacle with the MyNumber Card bank account matching last year.
> uniquely identify a foreign resident
Uniquely being identified is the easy part. Being _properly_ identified is something else altogether.
They’re not the same. おう is discernible from おお, and the difference can be important.
That said, this is far from the most important problem in Japanese pronunciation for westerners, and at speed the distinction between them can become very subtle.
Yes, for instance こうり （小売）is completely different from こおり （氷）.
If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong.
It is not reliably discernible as a statistical fact you can gather from a population sample of native speakers over many words, if they are asked to speak normally (not using spelling as emphasis, or using the words in a song).
> If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong.
There's literally a different sound, which is why the difference in kana exists. Disagree if you like -- as I said, it's subtle -- but I don't know why you feel the need to be insulting about it. Writing an inaccurate non-kana symbol for the two sounds is no more an argument than saying that the sounds are identical because they share a common romanization.
There are some words where you can more clearly hear the difference than others. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of 紅茶, vs your example of 氷. It's not wrong to pronounce the former as a long o, but you can hear the difference when natives say it. Similarly, こういう is not said as こおいう, and 公園 is not こおえん.
I think the confusion here is in the placement of the vowels. おお and おう do sound identical when pronounced as a single unit, but the おう in 小売 (こ.うり) isn't a single unit, it's just a お that happens to be next to a う
I’m new to the language and thought these would be the same. But I just listened to some words with the two and the おお definitely has like a bigger o sound. That’s quite subtle.
You’ll hear it more easily with time. It’s hard to completely separate stuff like this from context (i.e. it’s far more rare to have a collision in sound that makes sense if you know the rest of the sentence), but it does matter for discriminating between words when you’re trying to look words up, for example.
I've never heard of the /o:/ of おう and おお being different. I've never seen a small child, or foreign speaker, being corrected in this matter; i.e that they are using the wrong /o:/ for the word and should make it sound like this instead.
This is literally not a thing that exists outside of some foreigners' imaginations. You will sooner hear a difference from $1000 speaker cables before you hear this, and it will only be if you are the one who paid.
You may be letting by pitch accent deceive you. In words that contain /o:/ it's possible for that to be a pitch boundary so that pitch rises during the /o:/ and that can contrast against another /o:/ word where that doesn't happen.
The 頬 word in Japanese is "kinda funny" in that it has a ほお variant and a ほほ variant. It has always stood out in my mind as peculiar. I'd swear I've heard an in-between "ほ・お" that sound somewhat reminiscent of "uh oh", with a bit of a volume dip or little stop that makes it sound like two /o/ vowels. It could be that the speaker intends ほほ, but the second /h/ sound is not articulated clearly. It may even be that the ほほ spelling was invented to try to represent this situation (which is a wild guess, based on zero research). In any case, the situation with that cheeky little word doesn't establish anything general about おお/こお/そお/とお...
I've been fooled by my imagination. For instance, many years ago I thought I would swear that I heard the object marker を sound like "WO" in some songs; i.e. exactly how it typed in romaji-based input methods, because it belongs to the わ group. Like "kimi-o" sounding like "kimi-wo". Today I'm convinced it is just a kind of 空耳 (soramimi). Or the artifact of /i/ followed by /o/ without interruption, becoming a dipthong that passes through /u/: it may be real, but unintentional. It's one of those things that if you convince yourself is real, you will tend to interpret what you are hearing in favor of that.
That's actually a good example because there are so many covers of that, you can see whether you hear the "whoopy wo" from differnt speakers.
There is a similar situation in the pronunication o 千円. There is a ghost "ye" that appears to the foreign ear. To the point that we have developed the exonym "yen" for the Japanese currency!!! The reality is more like that the /n/ is nasalized, similarly to what happens when it is followed by /g/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg
OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition of the the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 832-833, we have all the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including pitch accents:
ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方、砲、鵬、朴
And, our cheeky word 頬 gets a separate entry here due to its pronunications ホー and ほほ。Both have a falling pitch after the leading ほ, like 方. No difference is noted.
ホー with pitch rising at the "o": 法、報
So of course if you compare someone saying 法律 vs 頬, there will be a difference. But a lot of longer ほお words have the same rising pitch like 法. 法律 (ほうりつ） vs 放り出す （ほおりだす）is the same.
Fairly intuitively, 頬張る（ほおばる）has rising pitch at the お、in spite of 頬 by itself exhibiting falling pitch.
> This is literally not a thing that exists outside of some foreigners' imaginations.
I think you're a little obsessed with this. It's not pitch accent and I'm not "being fooled", but if you want to insist that you know better...fine? You do you!
> OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition of the the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 832-833, we have all the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including pitch accents: ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方、砲、鵬、朴
I've already given you examples where you can often hear the difference if you try. These "ho-words" are completely unrelated, and non-responsive. You seem to be arguing about something else (or just trying to name-drop the NHK pronunciation guide).
Anyway, there are two distinct sounds in the kana table for う and お. They're individually pronounced differently, so why you're so resistant to the idea that combinations of the two might also have a difference in pronunciation, I don't really know. I've personally had native teachers tell me this, and I hear it all the time. Go ask a native to slowly sound out the individual mora for a word like 紅茶 vs. say, 大阪 -- that's how I first heard it.
Anyway, I'm not really interested in debating this further. It's a very, very minor point. Good luck with your study.
You need to know previously the word to write from Hepburn to Kana when "ō" is present because data is lost in such transliteration from おう or おお or オー to Hepburn.
The internet is full of romanji written incorrectly with "o" alone when it should be "ou" or "oo" due "ō" ASCII conversion errors at one moment.
(The sooner a beginner embrace Hiragana and Katakana, the better)
For what it’s worth as a long time learner of Japanese, none of these ambiguities has ever confused me nor hindered my ability to be perceived as natural to native speakers, so I think that this ambiguity is not such a big deal.
To me, Hepburn’s strength relative to the old government romanization is that it increases the likelihood that an English speaker will make approximately the right sound when reading some Romaji, and that people seem to prefer it in general.
What's interesting is that they address this problem where the latin alphabet introduces the ambiguity (Is genin げんいん or げにん? Hepburn goes with gen'in for the former to avoid ambiguity), so they could have extended that to sake'iro and applied the same strategy when the ambiguity comes from kana itself.
> In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē).
While it is sometimes difficult to discern the combined E and I sound, especially for non-native speakers, the word 先生 (sensei) is technically pronounced "sensei" and should be spelled that way to distinguish it from words with long E sounds, such as ええ (ee) and お姉さん (oneesan). Similarly, the OU in 東京 (toukyou) and the OO in 大きな (ookina) are different and should be spelled differently. I hope this helps.
Sure, and in a Japanese song, "sensei" can yield four beats or notes SE/N/SE/I.
But spelling out and singing aren't normal speech. Spelling/singing can break apart diphthongs, like NAI becomes NA-I.
生 is not written with い due to the /e:/ having a different sound from that one in from おねえさん. It does not (when you aren't spelling). It is written the way it is for ancient historic reasons.
> Similarly, the OU in 東京 (toukyou) and the OO in 大きな (ookina) are different
Why would you want to confuse the hell out of those learning Japanese by spelling せんせい (sensei) using an E with a macron, a la "sensē," when that is not at all how you spell it or type in phonetically in an IME? Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners, who are essentially the target of romanized Japanese, than creating a Hooked on Phonics version that is completely disconnected from writing reality.
I also think your comment, written in Japanese, saying, "This stupid nonsense isn't going to be of any use to anyone," is both ignorant and uncalled for.
In plain-text romanization, the standard and expected spelling is “sensei.”
That’s the formal, conventional representation, especially for typing and learning.
Phonetically, in natural speech, the vowel often compresses toward a long /e/ sound, so you may hear something closer to sense or sensee depending on context and speaker.
In stylistic writing (e.g. light novels or dialogue), you might occasionally see phonetic renderings to reflect speech, but in formal or instructional contexts, “sensei” remains the correct and expected form.
In short:
• Orthography: sensei
• Phonetics: can vary in actual speech
• Stylistic writing: sometimes bends toward pronunciation
Different layers, different purposes.
I think this may mostly be a case of people talking past each other.
One side is focusing on orthographic convention (how it’s written and typed),
the other on phonetic realization (how it’s actually pronounced in speech).
Those aren’t contradictory claims — they’re just different layers of the same thing.
Hi, ursAxZA. Yes, you're describing an "elision," which is where speakers drop or blur sounds together to make speech more fluid, like the way some people say, "Sup?" when they mean, "What's up?" or replace the T with a glottal stop in the word "mountain," as they do in Utah.
I wholeheartedly agree that it is fine to write things like "Sup?" when appropriate, such as dialogue in a novel. You see this all the time in Japanese TV, books, magazines, manga, etc. However, I disagree that elisions should dictate how we spell words in regular written communication, especially when discussing a tool meant to help non-native Japanese speakers learn the language. And as the parent poster pointed out, when singing, you would sing "se n se i" rather than "se n se e." The same is true of haiku and other instances where the morae (linguistic beats similar to syllables in English) are clearly enunciated.
As I said, sensei is technically four morae and different than "sensē," and, in my opinion, should remain that way in Romaji, it being a writing system and one method for inputting Japanese text.
Thanks for the respectful conversation. I appreciate the points you brought up.
Thanks — and yes, I think we’re essentially aligned now.
Once we separate the layers — orthography, pronunciation, and stylistic rendering — the friction mostly disappears.
Romanization is a writing system with its own conventions;
speech naturally undergoes reductions and elisions;
and creative writing sometimes pulls closer to the spoken register.
Different layers, different functions — and the confusion only arises when they’re collapsed into one.
Sorry, yes. That is my mistake. Hepburn doesn't use any such ē notation. Hepburn preserves えい and ええ as "ei" and "ee", conflating only "ou" and "oo" into ō (when they appear in a combination that denotes the long o:).
Some modern adaptations of his transcription do, however. E.g. Modern Japanese Grammar: A Practical Guide uses the transcription “sensee” (they consistently don’t use macrons in this book: e.g. they use oo for ō, etc.).
Hepburn didn’t write “sensē” himself because it 1880s it was still pronounced “ei”, not “ē”. If it were pronounced like it’s pronounced nowadays, you can bet he’d spell it with ē.
> Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners
It depends on the learner’s (and textbook author’s) goals. Sometimes, having a phonetic transcription of the more common pronunciation is a more important consideration.
Historically, Hepburn’s transcription pre-dates Japanese orthographic reform. He was writing “kyō” back when it was spelled けふ. Having one-to-one correspondence to kana was not a goal.
So writing sensē is kinda on-brand (even if Hepburn didn’t write like this, because in his times it still wasn’t pronounced with long e).
I think most learners probably only pick up maybe 50 words before switching from romaji to kana anyway, so in the grand scheme of things the romanization's correspondence to the kana orthography isn't that important.
Hepburn is poorly supported in some input methods, like on Windows. If you want to type kōen or whatever, you really have to work for that ō. It's better now on mobile devices and MacOS (what I'm using now): I just long-pressed o and picked ō from a pop-up.
That's one aspect I really love about macOS. I'm from a small country so nearly no one makes hardware with our exact layout, but with macOS I can always just long press to fill in the gaps. I just wish all apps used native inputs, not some weird half-baked solution they built themselves.
I rarely miss Linux, but I liked being able to have compose keys, most of which were very logical and fast to type. Now on MacOS, I either have to know the option (alt) combination or long press, which makes my writing with accents way slower.
My favorite Linux layout was US International + AltGr dead keys. Basically a US keyboard, but if you want an accented character, just press the AltGr+Accent key, then the letter.
If you frequently write the same characters, it's straightforward to create your own keyboard layout that matches your usage, using https://software.sil.org/ukelele/
Same with image viewers on the web. Google, twitter, imgur, and others seem hell bent on making the shittiest possible zoom and pan implementations to look at images.
What's the best way to type Japanese on Windows? (I have a QWERTY keyboard)
On mobile I just switch to the hiragana keyboard, but that obviously isn't a sane option on desktop unless I'm clicking all the characters with a mouse?
This is a good question. I have seen a wide variety over the years from native Japanese speakers. Some use the 1990s-style kana keyboard. Some use romaji input where real-time software (called an IME) automatically suggests conversion to the final Japanese word (katakana/hiragana/kanji, etc.). On a mobile phone there is usually an option to do 1990s feature phone style kana input, where the 12 key input is shown, and you press one key as many times as necessary to rotate to the correct kana that you wish to input. You can see young girls with frighteningly long fingers nails jamming away -- chatting with their friends via mobile text (Line, SMS, etc.). Their "touch memory" (and sensitivity) must be jaw-droppingly good -- like a professional drummer or something similar.
Native Cantonese speakers in Hongkong have similarly diverse input methods. I've even seen tiny digital draw pads at the public library. It is pretty exciting (to me!) to watch an elderly person furiously scribbling away on the pad, inputting traditional Chinese charaters to search something on the Internet or in the media catalog. I think it is very cool that public library makes a strong effort to empower all types of users.
Using the example from the top-level comment, you would install an IME, switch to hiragana mode, start typing "kouen" and convert to kanji when you see the right suggestion.
It might sound complicated at first, but you can do it pretty fast once you get used to it.
MS-IME or Google Japanese Input. (whatever)-Mozc on Linux. Use "IME On" mode for Japanese, "IME Off" mode for alphanumeric text inbetween.
"shio ha natoriumu[Space][Return][ImeOff](Na)[ImeOn] to enso[Space][Return][ImeOff](Cl)[ImeOn] kara dekite imasu[Return]"
-> "しおはなとりうむ(Na)とえんそ(Cl)からできています"
-> "塩はナトリウム(Na)と塩素(Cl)からできています"
(NOTE: spaces added for legibility)
Most Japanese users use this "romaji" input - which is more vibe heuristics based and not highly consistent with existing romanizations hence the change. Some use "kana" with full 51 Hiragana symbols on JIS keyboard(with ろ/backslash/underscore key to left of RShift, which makes it incompatible with ISO). I think "most people don't do this anymore" remarks refer to the fact that everyone's on the phone, and uses the "flick" input.
When it comes to input "best" is highly subjective, but with that said: Just adding Japanese support in the system language settings is fine.
Standard Qwerty keyboards are well supported, you'll need to either check the key shortcut to switch between inputs or do it with the mouse if it's infrequent enough.
People using it daily will tweak a lot more, have a straight to IME and straight out of IME key instead of the default switching pattern, potentially add more tweaks to always have half-width space and ponctuation whatever the mode they're in etc., but that's a rabbit-hole you'll be free to fall into.
BTW the reverse works well enough: Windows has a specific mode to force US ANSI on JIS layouts and still use the additional japanese keys. Kinda fun they felt the need to leave that mode in.
As others have said, people prefer different ways. My wife (Japanese) writes on Windows (Japanese edition) in romaji, and she's very fast. But she also says that in fact most Japanese (at least of her generation) don't write that way (they presumably use those small kana letters on Japanese-variant keyboards). As a non-native I also write the way she does, though I'm on Linux. I'm not sure why my wife writes using romaji, I should ask.. she wasn't an English speaker or anything, so why that worked for her I don't know.
I don't know now, but for the longest time, Google made a much better Japanese IME for Windows than Microsoft ("Google Japanese Input"). I started using it when running into reliability issues, like disappearing kanji dictionary, or frozen switching between roman and hiragana.
Assuming Microsoft's Japanese IME is still a dumpster fire, and the Google one has not succumbed to Googleshitification, that would be a way to go.
To enable the Microsoft IME there are some rituals to go through like adding the Japanese language and then a Japanese keyboard under that. It will download some materials, like fonts and dictionaries. A reboot is typically not required, I think, unless you make Japanese the primary language.
Once you have the keyboard, LeftShift + LeftAlt chord goes among the input methods. Ctrl + CapsLock toggles hiragana/romaji input. I think these are the same for Google or MS input.
The article says the new style says that you can use either a macron or a doubled letter, but it's not clear if that's supported for keyboard input on various platforms.
But in the case of ō, you can only use a doubled letter if the underlying word is おお. If it is おう then you don't have a doubled letter you can use; you need "ou" and that's not Hepburn any more. It is "wāpuro rōmaji" (word processor romaji).
Note: bitwize is talking about how to do it on Linux. Which is the best way in my biased opinion. Perhaps not the best mapping for people who use it regularly but is awesome for those who use it irregularly. We can usually guess how to do weird diacritics without having to look it up.
(The bugs I've experienced: it doesn't properly disable itself during video games, despite claiming to do so; sometimes the popup seem to come up when I swear I didn't press the shortcut keys; rarely, the popup gets stuck on screen and needs to be Alt+F4'ed.)
Yes. The work of art should require skills that took years to hone, and innate talent. If it was produced without such, it is a fraud; I've been deceived.
But in fact I was not deceived in that sense, because the work is based on talent and skill: that of numerous unnamed, unattributed people.
It is simply a low-effort plagiarism, presented as an original work.
Let me take a crack at it: people with college degrees tend to be found in populous places and spaces where smoking is prohibited. Plus, social pressure; lighting up a cigarette in certain company is almost like hurling a racist insult.
Just to get through college with a cigarette habit would have been a pain in the ass. You can't be darting outside N times during lectures or exams to have a smoke. If you can even do that; a lot of colleges nowadays have even outdoor smoking bans, no? That's sort of a place effect: college graduates spend a bunch of time in certain places where smoking would have been inconvenient to the point of making some people quit.
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