Katawa Shoujo Forums

Meh, I'm not even going to pretend to know Japanese. Maybe I'll pick some stuff up while I'm over there, though thats highly doubtful since Okinawa almost has a completely different language then mainland Japan (more Mandarin based, called Ryukyuan, and even that has different accents throughout the island). We will have to see though.

DuaneMoody wrote:

Aura wrote:Both "nose" and "flower" are pronounced the same way.

According to the thing i checked out from the library, they have different tones on the syllables. C'est la vie

There are *minor* differences in intonation, which is why listening to non-native speakers can be obvious.
However, 90% of intonation changes are more to do with grammar than with the literal meaning (and most of *that* is dealing with "casual" Japanese; "polite" Japanese has all of those grammatical markers spoken and not intonated).

If you were to pronounce everything monotonally, especially names, then you will be understood.

DuaneMoody wrote:

Aura wrote:Both "nose" and "flower" are pronounced the same way.

According to the thing i checked out from the library, they have different tones on the syllables. C'est la vie

They can, but they don't at the same time.
And yes, the pun has been made before...first time I saw it was in an episode of Bottle Fairies.
Romanization can be less tricky than some people make it. What annoys me is when they take the "tsu" and make it "tu" or "shu/sho/sha/shi" and make it "syu/syo/sya/si" even though the former of both are how it's actually pronounced. Worst part is both are technically considered correct under different translation conventions.
Barring kanji (which is a lot of memorization and symbol recognition. A LOT) Japanese is a very, very easy language to learn, with very few goofy rules as far as phonetics go. Of course, this awesome consistency leads to an absurd amount of context sensitivity (kami means "hair", "paper", and "god", albeit with different kanji of course) and, of course, enough puns to fill an aircraft carrier, the life boats, and the planes.
*EDIT* also, as a general rule for names 3 syllables or more, don't stress the middle syllable.
Shizune would be shizuNE and Hanako would be hana-KO. Generally I BELIEVE (don't quote me on this, though) that the kanji are used as the guideline for pronunciation. Since "hana" and "ko" are two separate kanji, "hana" is pronounced as one "word" and "ko" as another. In English we generally would say "haNAko", rather than "hanaKO". It's a little difficult for me to express this in text...but I had a very good Japanese teacher lol...
Of course in music all this goes out the window.

All this chatter is totally on topic.... Anyway thanks for (over) answering my question.

cpl_crud wrote:One thing that always bothers me is the fact that people that consider themselves fans of Japanese-themed entertainment never bother to learn (or, at the very least, pick up on) the pronunciation of Japanese words.

I watch my animes in English when possible. I dislike having to read subtitles when there's action or something else you should be keeping your eyes on. I'm still learning to pick up on Japanese Honorifics (I have san, kun, chan, senpai, and sensei down, I think.) I had a hard enough time learning the little bit of German that I do know when I took 1 year of German in high school.

Bara wrote:To get somewhat back on topic, I can empathise about mispronounced names. My last name is slavic and when my great-grandfather emigrated to America his name was "Americanized" by some helpful imigration official. Ever since then it has been spelled phoneticly acording to standard American pronounciation; but an amazing number of native speaking and educated people still manage to screw it up.

My last name is German, and there has never been an Americanized version of the name unlike a lot of other German names. Every time my name came up in roll-call when I was in school they would say my first name, then just stare at their sheet of paper and totally butcher the pronunciation, and I'd end up saying my last name to them. I got so used to it that it doesn't bother me when people say it wrong. The only person who ever pronounced my name correctly the first time was my German language teacher in high school.

You think that's bad, mate? My name is a mix of German and Hebrew so imagine the fun times I've had in class with people attempting to pronounce any parts of my name correctly. I pretty much just tell people to use my nickname so I don't have an urge to correct them... many times over.

kyuven wrote:What annoys me is when they take the "tsu" and make it "tu" or "shu/sho/sha/shi" and make it "syu/syo/sya/si" even though the former of both are how it's actually pronounced. Worst part is both are technically considered correct under different translation conventions.

Every time I see an R in a Japanese name romanized as L or it ends in a consonant other than N, I feel like I'm being patronized. I mean, it's actually offensive to me. If someone here can put this practice into some kind of context I'd be grateful.

And a shonen saga about fighting ghosts should not be named after the generic term for Clorox. No, just no.

Aura wrote:Both "nose" and "flower" are pronounced the same way.

Now I am wondering does Hanako mean flowerchild or flowergirl or something completely different because I always thought it was a reference to her needing to blossom (taking her hair away) to show her innate beauty or something like that, right?

It certainly sounds more poetic than "nosechild," doesn't it. I was told by a dev that the reason they ditched the original name Rosa for Shizune was the proliferation of flower names for the girls.

Validus Razgriz wrote:My last name is German, and there has never been an Americanized version of the name unlike a lot of other German names.

Well, as someone else pointed out, after a while you stop caring much and don't really bother to correct mispronounciations. It is only when I stop to think about how someone who was raised and educated speaking standard american english can screw up a standard american english phoneticized surname that my mind boggles a bit. It is akin to someone screwing up a name like Jacobson or Jefferson. (actualy those to examples are more complex than my last name since they both have more sylables and vowels.)
The only character name I find that I was pronuncing incorrectly was Shizune. I was reading it as "Shih-zoon". I find it hard to adjust to the correct pronunciation of "Shi-zu-neh". I seem to try to insist the three sylable pronunciation is an interogative with a rising inflection on the last one. Not that how I pronounce or mispronounce one characters name will affect my enjoyment of KS all too much.

If you've taken a foreign language for a few years then you'd probably find it less uncomfortable trying to pronounce the "e" at the end of foreign words. Unless you were stubborn in trying to pronounce the language you were studying as though it were English of course, which is a bad idea.

Also, my last name is German as well. Very few people get it right the first time, and those that do have presumably had German before. I've had various nicknames based on exaggerated mispronunciations of my last name, including Beederfelt, Bidoofeldt, and Bileffo. It's probably not nearly as bad as what one of my high school math teachers probably goes through, though -- her last name, also German, was Mlodoch. Damn if it isn't awkward for an English speaker to follow a word-initial "m" by another consonant -- hell, when I first saw the lyrics to Baba Yetu in Swahili I was convinced that the "m" at the beginning of a lot of words was either silent or some shit they made up to stand for another sound.

Caesius wrote:If you've taken a foreign language for a few years then you'd probably find it less uncomfortable trying to pronounce the "e" at the end of foreign words. Unless you were stubborn in trying to pronounce the language you were studying as though it were English of course, which is a bad idea.

Well, a year of half assed high school German and a few weeks of language class when I was stationed in Germany are the limits of my foreign language training. I didn't have too great of a problem with picking up useful bits of vocabulary and giving a comprehensible pronounciation. My problems came in forming a sentence in a proper German. I was unable to grasp the rules of grammar and syntax.
Once I learned that holding up a thumb and saying, "Ein bier, bitte." would get me what I wanted, I was happy enough.

DuaneMoody wrote:It certainly sounds more poetic than "nosechild," doesn't it. I was told by a dev that the reason they ditched the original name Rosa for Shizune was the proliferation of flower names for the girls.

The person that was the strongest Opponent to Rosa didn't like it becuase he thought it sounded Hispanic.

Hanako is written "Flower Child" becuase that is the common spelling of it. I wanted a different Kanji but I was too slow; as soon as the name was released it was assumed to be 華子

cpl_crud wrote:

DuaneMoody wrote:It certainly sounds more poetic than "nosechild," doesn't it. I was told by a dev that the reason they ditched the original name Rosa for Shizune was the proliferation of flower names for the girls.

The person that was the strongest Opponent to Rosa didn't like it becuase he thought it sounded Hispanic.

That's silly, it's also Italian.

cpl_crud wrote:The person that was the strongest Opponent to Rosa didn't like it becuase he thought it sounded Hispanic.

She's dark-haired, dark-eyed, domineering, large-breasted and talks with her hands. She's obviously Italian.