> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)
I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as し on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi".
I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.
> 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.
In the Hepburn romanization system, which generally tries to be transparent to speakers of English or other European languages, し is romanized as _shi_, because this indicates to English speakers that the /s/ -> /ɕ/ sound change happens. In the Kunrei-siki romanization system, which tries to be more faithful to the distinctions made in the Japanese phonological system, し is romanized as _si_ to be consistent with the other possible syllables _sa_ _su_ _se_ _so_ that begin with the consonant /s/.
And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet is a sign that their command of Japanese isn't all that good yet.
I don’t understand where this misunderstanding about my article comes from. I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”. My article uses romaji so this is self-consistent. I am also mentioning that there is an alternative system that would romanize it as “si” but that’s not the one I’m using in my article.
That is exactly the problem. Japanese doesn't distinguish between 'shi' and 'si', so all you're really gaining by pointing that out is learning how to correctly romanize Japanese, in a single system. Instead of learning the language you're learning how to represent the language in a foreign way.
The rule 0 of learning a language is to get rid of the crutches as soon as possible. Use their native writing system (or if they're one of the latin alphabet users, use their pronunciation rule), learn words of the target language using said language, and learn how to formulate concepts with the language rather than translating it from what you already know. Crutches should only be used to get to this point and no more. If you do that, details like 'si' and 'shi' are not even worth mentioning. Romanization methods have their own goals, and rarely is it about facilitating language learning.
An equivalent phenomenon going the other way (at least for American English speakers) is clearly distinguishing また mata "again" and まだ mada "yet" - American English speakers tend to merge /t/ and /d/ in that kind of intervocalic position (think about pronouncing "latter" and "ladder" identically), and it takes deliberate effort to pronounce distinct /t/ and /d/ sounds there in Japanese, where the American English sound law that merges them does not apply.
I wasn't really going for kunreishiki, more ワープロ, aka "whatever is the least typing to make the desired characters appear".
I think typing in IME is how most people actually interact day-to-day with romaji, and I lex "si" and "shi" identically because the difference is usually not important.
