Arlington YMCA Ju-Jitsu Dojo

Unlike English, the Romanji representation of Japanese words are generally consistent in pronunciation. Most syllables and words end in a vowel sound and there are no silent letters in the Romanji spellings. Thus, "shime" in Romanji is two syllables, not one as in English. There are five vowel sounds: a, e, i, o, and u. The vowels generally have only one sound associated with them (see below).

In addition to the Romanji, the The Overlook Martial Arts Dictionary (entries #3) includes a traditional (English) phonetic representation to aid in pronunciation. We have maintained the western habit of inserting spaces in the Romaji to aid in both recognition and pronunciation where the spacing usually indicates the separation of traditional Kanji characters. (Japanese usage of Romanji does not include the spaces nor does it use capital letters.)

There are also places where the sound changes slightly or the character used to represent the sound varies. For example, harai begins with an "h", but the same term when used in deashi harai is sometimes spelled with a "b". Another example is "shime", which will sometimes appear as "jime". These are more often variations in the Romanji representation and highlight the differences between the sound repertoire of Japanese and English. We have cross-referenced these with "see also" when appropriate.

Additional help with vowel pronunciation, along with sound files, can be found here.

A note on accents: the accent mark indicates that the pitch of the remaining syllables in the word or the next word (if the accent is at the end of a word) is to drop.

a	as in far
chi	"chee" as in cheek
e	as in edible
go	as in going
ha	like haw
hya	is a sound between hi and a
i	as in it
ju	as in June
ku	like coo
n	as in never
ni	like knee
o	as in coat
ro	as in rowing
sa	as in sock
shi	as in sheep
u	as in root

Last updated August 8, 1999.