Kaizoku Fansubs / Forums

300 is pronounced Sam-Byaku. You got the change from hyaku to byaku but with some words ending in N (ie: san) the ending vowel also changes to make it quicker/easier to pronounce the word.
Sorry if this seems petty but yes I registered simply to point that out.

Fantastic work with the subs though.  I downloaded that 1-429 torrent that was floating around out there and when I got to the portion of the anime that ya'll hadn't subbed past I stopped watching.  The other groups just don't do justice to the anime and I refuse to watch the mockery that 4kids did.

I'm not sure why it saddens you but okay.
That's just the way people talk here in Japan.
If you look at "Learning Japanese" books or talk to a teacher who is a native Japanese speaker they'll tell you the same thing.
Anyways, like I said, Good job with the fansubbing KF.

Kami-Ranma wrote:

Gebraheel, you're being ridiculous. Regardless of how the words are pronounced, there is only one way to write them. In this respect, it's like accents. Certainly, it may sound like an 'm' when you speak it frequently in casual speech -- as an example, I've frequently seen 'upperclassman' spelled out in Japanese as 'sempai' instead of 'senpai' because that's how it sounds sometimes. This is despite the fact that 'senpai' is the proper way of writing the Romanji for the hiragana used for that word. But like I said, that's beside the point. How you pronounce the words has no bearing on the written word. Hence, while it may sometimes sound like 'sambyaku', the hiragana is still typed in as 'sanbyaku'. In this, Foolio and KF are entirely in the right.

Well that's not entirely true, I mean there isn't actually a single "correct" way to do it. There are different styles people use, and you will see words that passed into English (unfortunately) with an "m" such as "tempura." You will also see some Japanese newspapers Romanize their name as "shimbun." But Japanese people are terrible/inconsistent at it anyway. If you argued for "m" based on sound, you'd also have to argue against "jya" instead of "ja" and "du" instead of "zu" and various other things used in Japan or in other Romanization "conventions." Actually, most Japanese people Romanize based on how they'd type it in a word processor ("du" is a good example of this). And unless you have a special text input interface, typing "sambyaku" will result in a Roman "m" stuck in the middle of your Japanese.

Gebraheel wrote:

I'm not sure why it saddens you but okay.
That's just the way people talk here in Japan.
If you look at "Learning Japanese" books or talk to a teacher who is a native Japanese speaker they'll tell you the same thing.
Anyways, like I said, Good job with the fansubbing KF.

Don't dig yourself a deeper hole. I've been to Japan, and everything I've learned has been from native speakers. I've taken Japanese linguistics in Japanese from a renowned PhD Japanese linguist. As for textbooks, they entirely depend on who wrote them and how serious they are about teaching Japanese. From a purely linguistic standpoint, such as if you're studying sounds, transcribing the way people pronounce, or are doing work completely unrelated to the grammar itself, an "m" is fine. The same way that writing short vowels on long-vowel words is fine if you're really looking at speech and the person said it short. But to anyone actually trying to learn the language, trying to put it back into kana, or trying to be consistent, it's rather atrocious, in my opinion. If you take the word "Tokyo" and try to put it in kana you'll be wrong since it's actually Toukyou. And an "n" is an "n." Sorry.

Oh, Also. Every website I found writes it "san-byaku".