So I’m teaching English at Juku and one of the early things we start with is kana to romaji, and things can get complicated sometimes when there are two ways to spell things. We teach the BPM rule for words like tempura instead of spelling it tenpura. The problem I have is when Japan does backflips on the spelling for cities. We have a question with 群馬 which should be Gumma according to the rule, and the main teacher that works with me explains that the home page of Gunma spells it as Gumma, which I think was correct last he checked, but when I went there to check it out it was clearly Gunma, and many other places spell it Gunma too. I’m wondering when they changed it to Gunma and why? And are there other cities that have changed their spelling in recent years? I read an article not long ago that Japan is now officially adopting the helpburn romaji spelling as the official romaji script in Japan instead of the older one that no one really uses anymore and they’re trying to phase out (sorry I forgot the name of the one that was predominantly used before hepburn took hold).
By the way I did bring this up with the main teacher in charge here in a non-confrontational manner because, God bless him, I knew he would want to stick with teaching Gumma, and of course that’s what we’re going to keep doing, right or wrong I don’t really care it’s not a big deal.
However, I did have one instance of a senior student using the old romaji script and it totally threw me off, I had no idea what he was trying to write without really scavenging for it with Google, patinko I could guess was pachinko but I wasn’t sure if there was an alternative game called “patinko” and the tokens/medals sometimes have “patinko” written on them apparently so I needed to make sure, and then “tintiro” had me completely lost, turns out chinchiro is a kind of dice game that also goes by it’s Chinese name usually so I really wasn’t getting any hits for my searches on this… Now I know about the ch and t mixup between the two scripts so I’ll have an easier time in the future with strange romaji spellings but geeze…
by JP-Gambit