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Genki I Textbook Mistake?

nihonmaru

後輩
14 Feb 2017
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Sorry I'm a beginner in learning japanese. So I was curious the other day when I looked up on the textbook, I found the romaji and hiragana form of the word for 'Ohayoo' is different in the textbook.

The hiragana is おはよう, so the romaji for it should be Ohayou right, not Ohayoo?
 
Indeed.

The reason you saw "ohayoo" somewhere is because in japanese, for many words , the "u" after an "o" actually sounds like if you're extending the "o" sound.
"ohayou" sounds like "ohayoo", just like "sensei" sounds like "sensee"
 
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There are different systems for writing romaji.

In general, the learning materials that use "ohayoo" instead of "ohayou" are crap.
 
As Mike-san pointed out, "oo" is used in JSL romanization system, so it's not a mistake.

JSL differs from Hepburn particularly in that it uses doubled vowels, rather than macrons, to represent the long vowels /oː/ and /ɯː/. Tokyo (Tōkyō) and Osaka (Ōsaka), for instance, would be written (Tookyoo) and (Oosaka) in JSL.

There is a close tie between Japanese pronunciation and JSL, where one consistent symbol is given for each Japanese phoneme. This means that it does depart from Japanese orthography somewhat, as おう is romanized as (oo) when it indicates a long /oː/, but as (ou) when it indicates two distinct vowel sounds, such as in (omou) for 思う (おもう).

JSL romanization - Wikipedia
 
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