Romanizing Japanese Song Titles Part 1:
Introduction to the Japanese Language and Writing System

By: Ed Boyd
Contributing Staff

Discovering Japanese music can be an amazing experience. Finding your favorite genre among the plethora of sounds can a very satisfying accomplishment for new fans, but buying albums and sampling CDs while learning about a country, its music, and culture can be overwhelming if you can’t keep up with the lingo and what little bit of the language finds its way into the foreign communities. The most important aspect of the Japanese language in J-music communities is what comes from song titles. Japanese is of a different language family than English, and unless you can read it or someone provides romanji titles for you, you’re stuck. Asking people to transcribe the titles for you can be a pain since it can take a long time, and not everyone has enough knowledge of the language to do it. So what do you do?

Over the next four months, I’ll be teaching you the quickest, easiest way to romanize song titles. No knowledge of the Japanese language is needed! Don’t worry, we’ll be going slow, so if you don’t get it on the first pass re-read and try it again. Here’s the breakdown for the next few months:

Part 1: Introduction to the Japanese Language and Writing System
Part 2: Transcribing Simple Kanji and Kana Titles
Part 3: Recognizing Particles and Attachments
Part 4: Transcribing Complex Titles

Setup

Before we do anything, you need to make sure you have Japanese text support installed on your computer. If you’re using Internet Explorer:

  • Right click
  • Go to encoding and
  • Choose any one of the Japanese options.

It should ask you if you want to install the language pack for Japanese. Click install and be sure to have your Windows disk handy. It will ask you for it about halfway through the installation. After that’s done the pack should be installed. For users who don’t use IE:

  • Go to windowsupdate.com
  • Search for the Japanese Language Pack.
  • Download and install.

It will ask you for your Windows disk here as well. If the following Japanese text doesn’t look like squares or a bunch of nonsense then you’ve done it! カタカナひらがな漢字 (Note: IE users: After installing the language pack, it’s best to go back to the encoding menu (right click, encoding) and select auto select. When you visit a Japanese web page, Explorer should automatically switch to Japanese so you don’t have to do it manually.)

I recommend installing the Chinese language pack as well. The processor program seems to want them both, even if you only use one.

The next step is to install the Japanese word processor we’ll be using over the course of the articles. Go to http://wakan.manga.cz/ If you like you can read about the project before clicking the download tab and downloading the program. Download and install Wakan. Don’t close the window just yet! We have into install the dictionaries, which are on the same page. You don’t need to download them all, but here are the ones you’ll need:

★ EDICT
★ ENAMEDICT
★ J_PLACES
★ SCICOMP
★ BUDDHDIC
★ CLASSICAL

Next install the dictionaries.

  • Unzip the contents of the file
  • Drag and drop the main dictionary file into the Wakan folder

(Note: When you drag the EDICT into the Wakan folder it will ask you if you want to replace the file. Say yes.)

Next open Wakan and go to Tools then settings. We need to make sure Wakan is properly set up for Romanizing.

  • Click romanization
  • Under “Romanization System” make sure Hepburn (English) is selected
  • Under “Show Phonetic In” make sure Katakana\Hiragana is selected
  • Under “Text Translator” click:
    • Break lines at word boundaries
    • Display lines
    • Leave space between lines

I STRONGLY recommend that you read through the help files and complete the tutorials so you’ll be familiar with the program for the next step in learning to romanize Japanese song titles.

Now that we’ve done that, let’s get on to familiarizing ourselves with Japanese!

A Brief History of Written Japanese

In 391 A.D. Japan sent an expedition to Korea. The Japanese found themselves in a middle of a war, in which they rescued King Paikche from certain defeat. Their reward came in the form of books and scholars in the year 400 A.D. The books contained the Chinese language, and were the beginnings of the Japanese writing system that’s used today.

Adapting a monosyllabic (one syllable) language to polysyllabic (many syllables) language was harder than it seemed. Each Chinese character or kanji has a meaning and in order to use them to write in Japanese the meanings had to be disregarded, and Chinese kanji were used phonetically. For example instead of using the character that meant dream, 夢,(yoo-meh) they had to spell out the word phonetically using the Chinese equivalents for yu and me. Each character stood for one Japanese syllable.

Over time this became bothersome, and soon enough the Japanese used the proper meanings for kanji characters and identified them with the Japanese meanings. Nevertheless this was still a complex process, and learning kanji was quite the task, because some kanji can have up to 20 strokes.

Hiragana was developed in the hopes of making things a little easier on the Japanese. It’s unknown who developed it, but it was created by simplifying the cursive form of Chinese kanji called sousho, (sooh-show) as opposed to the kaisho (kah-aye-show) or print form of Chinese kanji. Here are some examples:

Known in those times as 女手, (ohn-nah-deh) meaning woman’s hand, hiragana became popular among women. Hiragana is phonetic and has no meaning unless it’s paired with other hiragana, katakana or kanji. Back then women weren’t allowed access to Chinese kanji, so they used hiragana for everything from writing books to dairies. Some of the greatest novels written by the females of that period, known as the 平安 (heeh-ahn) Era were written entirely in hiragana.

Developed by Buddhist monks, katakana was created so students would have an easier time taking notes because it was extremely difficult keeping up with kanji readings during lectures. Unlike hiragana however, katakana was created entirely from parts of kanji, but it was similar in that it is entirely phonetic as well. Here are some examples

Katakana began being used for more than just note transcription. It found its way into academic fields soon thereafter.

Hiragana and katakana became known as かな, (kah-nah) and along with kanji made up the Japanese writing system. The three systems were used independently until after the Second World War when rules were created to try and make the system a little less cumbersome to use. Kanji would be used for nouns and stems of adjectives and verbs. Hiragana would be used for adjective and verb endings, as well as guides to reading kanji with uncommon readings and grammatical particles, or 助詞, (jo-shee) which we’ll get into during part 3. Katakana would be used for words that were borrowed from languages other than Chinese.

The number of kanji was considerably cut down as well. 50,000 were said to occupy the largest dictionary in the old days compared to the 10,000 in use today, and only 1,900 of those have been designated for everyday use.

Katakana and hiragana saw some changes as well. It was most likely that at this point some syllables were cut from the alphabet as well. For example hiragana and katakana “we,” pronounced weh and written as ゑ and ヱ respectively, are no longer in use today, even though the syllable itself still exists in katakana.

That isn’t to say that the old system is totally dead. Much in the way calligraphy is used in the U.S. and other Western countries, remnants of the old system of Japanese writing is used by martial arts and etiquette schools as well as religious organizations in the same manner.

Aside from removing characters from the system, the Japanese adopted the Chinese readings for kanji called 音読み, (ohn-yoh-mee) as well as keeping the Japanese readings called 訓読み (koohn-yoh-mee) This opened up a world of possibilities for kanji readings and is the reason why they are so difficult today

Romanji, written as ローマン字 (roh-mahn-jee) and literally meaning roman character, is not without its place in Japanese culture. Companies like Sony (ソニー) use it when going abroad. It’s also used for style purposes as well. It’s written phonetically just as with kana and plays a huge part in J-music communities because it’s how song titles are normally passed among fans.

Unless you share my passion for languages you probably don’t want me to carry on about the history of Japan’s language and writing system so let’s move on

Katakana and Hiragana

It’s time we started learning kana, as it’s vital to transcribing or romanizing song titles with the roman alphabet. This will be the hardest part of the process because while many sites will give you the readings of kanji in hiragana, I’ve yet to find one that will give them to you in romanji. Go to http://www.kanjisite.com/index.html (You will need the flash plug-in) and click start. Select kana from the list and read both sections thoroughly. You aren’t going to learn it overnight so be patient and take your time. Even if you don’t learn them both by the end of next month you can still use the site and this article for reference, something I strongly recommend. I also recommend staying away from the kanji until you’ve become familiar with kana. That will only complicate things.

As great as this site is, it does have some flaws. You’ll find that katakana has many more syllables than hiragana that the site fails to list. Here they are in phonetic order:

I’ve bolded the more popular syllables in case you wanted start with those first. You don’t have to learn the others, but it’s good to know them in case you to come across them.

REMEMBER! Pay close attention to the syllable combinations. When the following kana is half the size of the one that proceeds it, it’s a compound syllable.

Study hard and next month we’ll start romanizing titles. 頑張って!! (gahn-bat-te) Good luck!