Romaji
From OLSEncyclopedia
Rōmaji ローマ字 ro-maji (literally Roman characters) refers to writing Japanese in the Latin alphabet. The three main systems of rōmaji are Hepburn romanization, Kunrei-shiki Rōmaji, and Nihon-shiki Rōmaji.
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The Dilemma
One day Vincent asked Dark Nadir: "Kaio vs Kaioh vs Kaiou. What's the difference?" Dark Nadir replied that there was no real difference; they are simply different styles of romaji. That is true, but here's some additional discussion on why these different styles exist in the first place. In Japanese, this would be written in hiragana simply as かいおう. か=ka. い=i. お=o. う=u. (See hiragana for pronunciation details.) In that sense, "Kaiou" is the most accurate; each hiragana consistently gets represented with particular letters. However, anyone who really cares about accurately mapping out hiragana in romaji is probably a linguist who can already read hiragana anyway, which means that romaji really is unimportant to them. Romaji's real purpose, then, is to give Westerners some idea of how to pronounce Japanese words. While "kaiou" gives some clue, Kaio is arguably superior because it excludes the U that might lead to incorrect pronunciations. However, given that the correct pronunciation for かいおう is simply kai (like the "ki-" in the word "kite") and ou (like the word "oh"), for someone who has not studied Japanese, kaioh may be the best choice. The inclusion of the H probably offers some indication that the emphasis falls on the O sound at the end of the word, unlike kaio, while the overall pronunciation remains fairly intuitive, unlike kaiou.
Complication!
To further complicate matters, the traditional Hepburn style uses a macron to indicate long vowels, e.g. kaiō. The disadvantages to this method should be obvious. For one, a standard keyboard cannot input a macron character by itself, so this means bringing up Windows' character map or some other program just to enter the character. Also, like kaiou, the average person may or may not know what the ō is meant to indicate, or for that matter care. Indeed, the spelling kaio probably comes as a result of these two limitations.
Further Complication with no Resolution!
Worse still, katakana elongates vowels differently than hiragana. This is actually illustrated by the word romaji itself: ローマ字. The ー character indicates an elongated O sound for the ro- in romaji, but the ー character, although essentially the same in pronunciation as the う character, is technically different, creating problems for purists who would insist on the "kaiou" romaji choice above. Essentially: う's romaji is "u" but ー's romaji is not totally clear. As the beginning of this article illustrates, sometimes a hyphen might be used as a romaji equivalent. The advantage to this is that a hyphen is the character used in IME input systems for Japanese to create the ー and it provides a unique symbol for the ー. The disadvantage is that it also runs a high risk of not being properly understood by the average person. This is because of several reasons: first, hyphens are not used this way in English; second, hyphens are sometimes used in romaji to indicate title suffixes (e.g. 山田さん becomes yamada-san). At this point, the traditional Hepburn system of using macrons starts to seem appealing again, but then this has problems of its own, as already discussed.
In Conclusion . . .
So returning to the original question: why do all the various styles of romaji exist? Because romaji is inherently an imperfect system and anyone serious about learning Japanese should not use it unless writing to a non-Japanese-speaking audience. Period.
Romaji in IME
Romaji is one method of writing Japanese on a computer. By default, romaji will convert into hiragana characters. Once you are familiar with romaji, the system is relatively intuitive. Typing "a" generates あ; typing "ka" generates か, etc. There are a few special points to discuss, however.
First, the ん character (n) is created by typing "n" twice. This is because there are other hiragana that start with "n" (な na, に ni, にゃ, nya, etc.) so it is necessary to have some way to lock in the hiragana choice.
Second, katakana is entered by entering the hiragana as normal and then pressing the F7 key. Thus, if you type "gure-tojobu" this will initially generate ぐれーとじょぶ. But if you then press F7, it will convert it to the katakana equivalent, グレートジョブ. Alternatively, for katakana words with which IME is familiar, you can also simply press the spacebar and this will convert the hiragana to katakana.
Third, although there are normally no spaces between words in Japanese, the spacebar is still used to separate words in a sense. As just mentioned, the spacebar can sometimes be used to convert common katakana words from hiragana to katakana. However, it can also be used to convert hiragana into kanji. However, Japanese has many homonyms, so sometimes it may be necessary to press the spacebar a second time to bring up a dropdown menu of all of the input choices. For instance, consider the Japanese verb みる miru (to look). This is normally written as 見る, but can also be written as 観る, 診る, 看る, and 視る, which all have different meanings. The importance in using the correct kanji is analogous to using the correct spelling in English. It changes the meaning of the word, and can appear foolish if used incorrectly. To illustrate, consider situations in English when a writer misuses "to," "too," and "two." The point is, kanji, like spelling, matters. And of course, this also demonstrates why romaji is a poor substitute for kana and kanji.
