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Nihon-shiki (Japanese: 日本式ローマ字, lit. 'Japan-style', romanized as Nihonsiki in the system itself) is a romanization system for transliterating the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet. Among the major romanization systems for Japanese, it is the most regular one and has an almost one-to-one relation to the kana writing system.
For example, 東京 (とうきょう) is properly romanized as Tōkyō, but can also be written as: Tokyo – not indicated at all. Common for Japanese words that have been adopted into English, and the de facto convention for Hepburn used in signs and other English-language information around Japan.
The list below shows the Japanese readings of letters in Katakana, for spelling out words, or in acronyms. For example, NHK is read enu-eichi-kē (エヌ・エイチ・ケー). These are the standard names, based on the British English letter names (so Z is from zed, not zee), but in specialized circumstances, names from other languages may ...
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
For example, き (ki) plus ゃ (small ya) becomes きゃ (kya). Addition of the small y kana is called yōon. A small tsu っ, called a sokuon, indicates that the following consonant is geminated (doubled). In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare さか, saka, "hill" with さっか, sakka, "author".
The Japanese Sign Language syllabary (指文字, yubimoji, literally "finger letters") is a system of manual kana used as part of Japanese Sign Language (JSL). It is a signary of 45 signs and 4 diacritics representing the phonetic syllables of the Japanese language. Signs are distinguished both in the direction they point, and in whether the ...
The first letters in such phrases give the ordering of the non-voiced initial sounds. For vowel ordering, the vowel sounds in the following English phrase may be used as a mnemonic: Ah, we soon get old. The vowel sounds in the English words approximate the Japanese vowels: a, i, u, e, o.
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Japanese language pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters .