Learning any second language is a daunting process, but with Japanese, where the written language is so radically different than the way English speakers write, this is more so. Native Japanese speakers themselves go through a long hard mastering process, from elementary school to high school, on how to read and write Chinese characters, which makes it doubly a struggle for anyone who is a native speaker of a language that is written in a simpler phonetic script that is much easier to remember. To mitigate this supreme obstacle, a system that is called "Romanji" has been developed to allow the international community a way to escape this roadblock of language and be readily able to experience the Japanese language accessible on the terms of the English language. The problem with this turning of Japanese into English is that it is an imperfect solution to the problem because there are sounds in the Japanese language that an English speaker does not naturally produce. The Japanese don't exactly pronounce vowels the way we do, so you need a pronunciation guide to be able to fit Japanese into an English language type of writing system, which is why you'll find of many online lists like this explaining the Japanese phonetic pronunciation against how vowels are sounded in English: "a" as in "father" which is spoken as "ah" since the "t" is silent here "e" as in "bet" which is spoken as "eh" "i" as in "meet" which doesn't quite match phonetically "o" as in "story" which is spoken as "oh" "u" as in "shoot" which is another phonetic mismatch In Romanji, every Japanese vowel is given an English phonetic value that doesn't quite match how it is spoken. In other words, it's an inexact reproduction of Japanese vowels into an English syllabary so non-native Japanese speakers don't have to struggle to comprehend it. This can lead to some confusion when you try to compare the languages when using the Romanji system. It's easy to find on the internet a lot of places that argue that since the Japanese word "Tõkyõ" is counted as four syllables in Japan, but is changed into the two syllable "Tokyo" by English speakers, is proof that there is a big different in the syllable structures of the two languages. Is this true? If you check out the Japanese syllabus at the head of this post, you see that for the most part the Japanese count syllables as consonants with vowels attached just like we do. The vowels are different, we know, but they aren't accurately being reproduced into our English syllabary for them. So how does this effect the way they are being reproduce for English speaker consumption? The syllabic different between the Japanese and English pronunciation for Tokyo is predicated on the difference between the two "o" sounds spoken in the word. The fact is that if you took an English speaker without any knowledge of the Japanese language and stuck them in the middle of city of Tokyo had them say "Tokyo" not many native speakers in Japan would understand them, and the same would be true if you did the same with a Japanese speaker and put them in an American city and had them say "Tõkyõ" in perfect Japanese. (Equally true with baseball player names.) The reason why this happens isn't because there is huge syllabic difference the two languages, the reason is because the word isn't being pronounced the same. If you want to get a better sense of how the word is spoken and heard by Japanese speakers, you have to fill in the vowel sounds as explained by the list above, which gives us the word "Tohookyohoo". Now, you too are pronouncing the word as four syllables. Of course, once you start rendering these truer phonetic equivalents into English you get a messy scrambled language which makes it very difficult for the second language reader to pick up. Let's use this famous haiku as an example: Fooroo eekeh yah Kahwahzoo tohbeekohmoo meezoo no ohtoh (17) Furu ike ya Kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto (16) It is certainly much easier for an English speaker to navigate through the second example than the first, the reason being that the second is putting the Japanese into a writing system that follows the set expectations of the phonetic sounds that are attributed to the letters of the English alphabet. However, that doesn't mean it is an accurate reproduction of the phonetics sounds of the Japanese language. I'm not arguing that the phonetic style of transcribing should be favored over the Romanji system in use, but I do think that it is imperative for anyone studying Japanese literature to be aware that the current Romanji system isn't a true representation of the sounds of the Japanese language and if you want a better understand of the syntactic diction of Japanese literature it is better to start incorporating authentic phonetic renderings into your studying. The same is true for all the loan words from English which are now in Japanese too, the reason why a one syllable word like "spoon" gets expanded into "supu-n," which counts as four, is because the Japanese language doesn't have the "sp" consonant blend and must get creative to capture how the word sounds in English This expansion of this word into a four count might seem drastic but, as someone once explained to me, the loan words borrowed from English are Japanese words now and should be treated as such, so if we treat this as a native Japanese word and put it into its phonetic Romanji form we get' "soopoo-n" which isn't so large a difference anymore and is only a two syllable word for English speakers. The Japanese language doesn't have "sp'" in its verbal lexicon, in fact, every word in Japanese that begins with "supu" letter combination is a loan word from another language. Plus, since Japanese is a basically a syllable stressed language where each syllable generally carries an equal time value, it also has to set up speech strategies for words that come from timed stress languages like English where syllables are both scrunched and elongated. Speech is the use of breath to put words into the air and every language has internal standards that allow speakers to do this naturally without having to take excessive pauses for breath. When a syllable stressed language imports words from a time stressed language not only does it have to contend with sounds foreign to it, it also has to deal with being able to use it in phrases where it doesn't break the natural linguistic flow of the language. Which is why "spoon" explodes into "supu-n" when it is used by the Japanese and why they abbreviate the longer syllable words they borrow from English. This expanding, and deflating, of words to fit lexicon is proof that there is a measure of syllabic time difference between English and Japanese by the stopwatch, but we don't count syllables by the stopwatch. If we did we wouldn't count shorter words like "a" and longer words like "scrunch" as having the same syllable count. Instead, we count by vowels informed by consonants, which is the pretty much the same way the Japanese count their "mora". The only difference in counting is that the Japanese have the bare word ending sound of "n" without any vowel that they count as one, whereas we always count "n" as being connected to a vowel, and they also count double consonants as one, which we never do, which is insignificant in the overall scheme of the two languages. Once you get over the inherent obstacle given by Romanji's inability to give the true representation of vowel sounds in the Japanese language you see that both syllables and mora do weighed equally by the same scales of counting. Only now do have the correct values to question what syllable length the Japanese poetic forms, i.e. haiku, tanka etc, should be when written in the English language.
The Haiku Experiment 