How is it harder for non-English speakers? Knowing the kana pronunciation for Sinzyuku is way harder than knowing the English pronunciation of Shinjuku for most outside of JP. Also, JP schools already teach English from grade 1 onward so if anything, seeing the English transliteration aligns way better and enforces what they are already being taught. Not to mention katakana spellings and pronunciation which further confuse their learning of English. Previously you effectively had three different representations of foreign words with different spellings, this cuts it down to two which significantly decreases the cognitive overload
> How is it harder for non-English speakers? Knowing the kana pronunciation for Sinzyuku is way harder than knowing the English pronunciation of Shinjuku for most outside of JP.
Only if they're English speakers! If your only language is e.g. Irish then writing that sound as "Shi" is more confusing than writing it as "Si".
> Not to mention katakana spellings and pronunciation which further confuse their learning of English. Previously you effectively had three different representations of foreign words with different spellings, this cuts it down to two which significantly decreases the cognitive overload
Maybe. Or maybe the way Hepburn creates "blurred" words that are partially English and partially Japanese causes more confusion than having a clear distinction between written English and written Japanese words that makes it easier to pronounce each one in the way appropriate to that language (i.e. fully code-switch as fluent bilingual people do).
Yeah those are fair points. I still think that to encourage wider learning and understanding from foreigners, using English as a base model makes sense because it is most widely taught across the world.
As far as the second point, I taught English in Japan and found that while English education starts at an extremely young age, their relative skill is pretty low compared to other countries that do the same. There are a couple of reasons for this but I think further integration of English pronunciation could help in this department while also appealing to the widest swathe of tourists possible.
Another funny thing I’ve found is that the romaji JP iphone keyboard autofills kana and kanji best with hepburn inputs
