classroom2

Early in the 1900's, an Englishman by the name of Charles Hepburn visited Japan and attempted to modernize the country in the western ways of life, as Japan was still very feudal back then (the Edo era). He took great time and effort in learning the culture first-hand, and also the language, but noticed a simple problem in the writing system which made translation into English very difficult. Therefore, he created his own method, known commonly today as the Hepburn System (duh). ^_^
Sometimes, when writing Romaji (remember, that's Japanese words written with western/European letters instead of Oriental characters), it is necessary to extend a vowel sound to change a word. For example:

      imasu = to exist; "is there"

       iimasu = to say

Both words are pronounced exactly the same!! The only difference is that, in the first example, the stress falls on the "ma" sound, whereas in the second example, the stress falls on the "ee" sound. It's easy enough to distinguish the sounds when spoken, but the spelling in Hiragana proved difficult for Hepburn.
For my purposes, im going to spell out how each one of those words sounds, but remember! THIS IS ONLY HOW IT SOUNDS, NOT HOW IT'S SPELLED!!

        imasu = (sounds like) ee-mas

        iimasu = (sounds like) eeeeee-mas

Wakarimashita? As for the tricky Hiragana, Hepburn's system helped put the western mind at ease. Here is a lesson in Hiragana:

When writing in Hiragana, you always change the repeated vowel in a word into a "u", UNLESS it comes at the front of a word. "iimasu" would still be spelled that way, because the repeated vowel is at the beginning. Let's use the word Tokyo. In Japan, the name of this city is actually spelled "Tookyoo". When Hepburn saw this drawn in Hiragana, it would have looked like this: "Toukyou", which confused him. So, in order to not confuse himself (or any other non-native speaker) anymore, he shortened the word from "Tookyoo" to "Tokyo", and drew short lines over the vowels that get repeated, similar in appearance to our own Enlish symbol for a "long vowel sound". Examples will be provided soon.

The letter "n" is the only single-digit letter*, besides all of the vowels. It is pronounced, "nn", not "en". When written in Romaji, it is always followed by an apostrophe, unless it is the last letter of a word. Be very careful not to confuse it with the letters "na, ni, nu, ne, no"... if it truly is the letter "n", it will be followed by a consonant.

         1) Kon'ban wa

         2) Ben'kyoo

         3) Ten'pura

Synonimouse with the letter "n" is the alternate form, "m", which is not as common, but is still used followed by an apostrophe.

      1) Zem'bu

         2) Am'mari

         3) Sam'po

*- sometimes you will notice consonants repeated, thus appearing to be letters on their own, such as: "Kissaten", "Issho ni", or "Gakkoo". These are differentiated in Hiragana, in which the first consonant that is repeated is drawn by a subscript "tsu". for example, if I were to spell out these words in Hiragana, they would look like this:

        Kissaten = Ki - Tsu - Sa - Te - N

         Issho ni = I - Tsu - Shi - Yo - Ni

         Gakkoo = Ga - Tsu - Ko - U

Wakarimashita? I mixed up several lessons in those examples. The only one I don't expect you to understand right now is the spelling of "issho ni", which will be explained after the secondary and tertiary alphabets.