19th October 2004, 12:44 PM
Quote:Uh, you said "shi-i. Two syllables". That was false, it is one long syllable.
One long syllable? I don't know all the rules, could be... I know that 'shi' is a syllable and 'i' is a syllable and 'shii' isn't one of the base syllables, anyway. For pronunciation of course I was saying i but thinking that we both knew that it's pronounced e.
Quote:When people started to spell Japanese words with roman characters they pretty much spelled things phonetically so that it would be easy for westerners to read them correctly. Some strange rules were made, but once you learn what those rules are it is pretty easy to pronounce Japanese words using our alphabet. Well, granted that you know how to roll your r's correctly, something most Americans can't do because of how "soft" our accent is.
Yeah, I know it's simple once you learn that (not all that complex) rules... with the Roman alphabet it's not a very hard language at all. And it seems to phonetically fit in it pretty well... the problem for us comes from the character writing system. :)
As for rolling r's, I can do that... you have to be able to do that in Spanish as well.