ビー玉: びい or びー?

Soo I’ve always thought that in cases like びい and びー, they’re pronounced exactly the same and there’s not any difference between them, just that ー is used instead in katakana. When learning ビー玉 I realised that that isn’t the case??? Typing biidama for the reading is apparently incorrect, whereas biーdama is correct, but surely there’s no difference between them? In fact I feel like biidama is better since you’re giving the reading in hiragana, not katakana… idk :upside_down_face:

It’s akin to arguing that it should be fine to write the word “can” as “kan,” because it sounds the same. ビー玉 is what was chosen to be deemed the correct spelling of the word. :slight_smile:

WK allows you to input the answer in hiragana, but the official spelling is in katakana for the ビー. Hold down shift as you type, and you’ll get the katakana version. :+1:

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The difference is that one is the way Japanese people write their language and the other is not.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to decide that. WK is following how Japanese people have decided that their written language should be.

Edit to add:
Also, the reason why the ビー part is written in katakana is because it’s an abbreviation of ビードロ which is loan word of the Portuguese word ‘vidro’. And the usual convention is that foreign loanwords (with of course exceptions) are written in katakana.

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