4.1. Pronunciations and Romanization
The romanization of Japanese is used to write Japanese with alphabets. There are several ways of the romanization, and I explain the Hepburn romanization here.
The words at the beginning of sentences, as well as proper nouns, are written with a capital letter exactly like English.
Spellings are almost the same as the pronunciations, but there is a special way to write succesive vowels. If there are two same vowels in a row, use the vowel with a circumflex ("^") instead of writing the same vowel alphabet twice. You can use macrons ("¯") instead of circumflexes. The circumflexes are often omitted in English even though that makes confusion. Please remember that in colloquial Japanese, phoneme /ou/ is pronounced as "oo", and phoneme /ei/ is often pronounced as "ee" if quickly spoken.
| Phoneme | Pronunciation | Romanization | Romanization
w/o circumflex
|
|---|
| /aa/ | "aa" | â | a
|
| /ii/ | "ii" | î | ii
|
| /uu/ | "uu" | û | u
|
| /ee/ | "ee" | ê | e
|
| /oo/ | "oo" | ô | o
|
| /ei/ | "ei" or "ee" | ei | ei
|
| /ou/ | "oo" | ô | o
|
Here is an example:
| Hiragana: |  |  |   |
|
| Phonemes: | to | u | kyo | u
|
| Meaning: | Tôkyô (noun)
|
The phoneme of this word is /toukyou/. Since /ou/ is pronounced as "oo" in colloquial Japanese, its pronunciation is "tookyoo". Using circumflexes for succesive vowels produces Tôkyô, which becomes Tokyo if the circumflexes are omitted. In fact, the circumflexes are almost always omitted in English. Tôkyô has been capital of Japan since 1603, and it was called 
/edo/ until 1868.
Even though the word /toukyou/ has four syllables, its English notation Tokyo looks to have only two syllables. So use circumflexes whenever possible.
The time length necessary to pronounce /toukyou/ is the same as my hometown 
/yokohama/. Many English speakers pronounce Yokohama much longer than a native Japanese speaker would do.
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