When to use roman alphabet / arabic numerals in Japanese?

5 comments

1. [deleted]

2. > Is there a general rule on when to use these, or do you know of any article / guide that covers it?

   For Latin script, it’s usually only for abbreviations (sometimes even for Japanese things, like NHK or JR), and words that are established to be written like that (which is extremely arbitrary), like names of certain companies or organizations (for example Twitter appears 330 times in the [Wikipedia article](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter) about it, ツイッター only 71 times) or brand/product names (e.g. the [Wii](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii))

   For numbers it’s generally like Rhopegorn said, but that’s only a very rough guideline and both are used in either direction quite frequently

   > Do you do an english reading of these, or do you read them “in Japanese”?

   Japanese, although the pronunciation of individual letters in initialisms is mostly just English pronounced like Japanese

   > Also, what about titles? If I have a book that has no Japanese title, would I “translate it” to katakana?

   I don’t have much experience with that particular situation personally, but I think I’ve usually seen something like a Japanese translation followed by the original Latin script title in parentheses

3. The rule are about the same as anything with orthography in Japanese: Whatever the writer wants.

   Japanese does no really have the same sense of standardized orthography as many other languages. — Not only can the same word often be written with Chinese characters or not, it can also often be written with different Chinese characters depending on mere taste.

   Especially informally, Japanese speakers sometimes choose to romanize Japanese words for no other reason than to lend some kind of emphasis. I’ve seen this happen in both fiction and forum posts but of course it won’t happen easily in a newspaper.

   As for loans and foreign names, it’s entirely style whether to leave them in the original Roman orthography or render them in 片仮名. I’ve also very often seen Korean names inside of Japanese text rendered in the roman alphabet for instance and it also depends heavily on *milieu*. It is particularly common in engineering and scientific contexts keep more things in the Latin script as well as often in internet chatrooms.

   A particular thing that always stuck by me that I saw once but never again was “*俺を好kっ*” inside of a Japanese text; it was meant to indicate interrupted speech of a fictional character but since the Japanese script can’t write down single consonants this was used.

4. Latin script is only used as designated in proper nouns with some exceptions like the abbreviations you listed (Acronyms like PCR that become widely known). Japanese people will not just write a random word in romaji for effect.

   As for numbers I would say that any reading of numbers as numbers is 123456789. Dates, amounts, mathematics, etc. The exception to this will be counters. 一人、二人 or 一つ、二つ or 一本、二本 etc. These we may write with kanji because we kind of view them as a separate concept from numbers at large. It would however not be particularly strange to see, 1人、２つ、3本 or any of these mixed with Arabic numerals. Generally if the focus is the amount we may write with numerals (何人いるの？→ 5人くらいかな。）and if the focus is what the amount means（一人で行くの？→え、二人で行こうよ）we may write with kanji. Also, the larger the amount the more likely we are to use numerals. Anything above 3 and the likelihood of kanji being used decreases dramatically.

5. One thing I noticed on menus in Japan is that the fancier/more traditional a restaurant is, the more likely they are to use kanji numerals.