Cool. Today I learnt ぬう is also just one long sound, and not two stuck together 
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But, that is hiragana??? What you’re asking is like I’m trying to learn english and I need each lesson to tell me that “m” = mmmmm sound and “n” = nnnnnnn sound, no I won’t learn the alphabet you’re missing the point
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Yeah, I’m a little bit confused too😅.
If you learned hiragana you would know that ぬ is “nu” and う is “u”, so surely ぬう=nuu.
Or if you learned that に is “ni”, ゆ is “yu”, にゅ is “nyu”, and う is “u”, surely にゅう=nyuu.
Maybe I’m still not getting the full picture 
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Sadly that was just my ignorance. I didn’t exactly know that ぬう is pronounced as “nuu” (I thought it was “nu-u”).
The mnemonic “new” still pretty much sounds like にゅう (“nyuu”). That’s why that is used 
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Sorry, would you mind explaining this bit? Just want to make 100% sure I’m getting your struggle
I really wanna help 
We have to write “にゅう” because that is how the kanji is pronounced. And the mnemonic is just there to help you remember what the kanji sounds like
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So are you saying that the new WK user might know Hiragana, but happen to have zero idea how to actually type in Japanese, and therefore would have no knowledge that in order to get にゅう they need to type “nyuu” on the English keyboard? That’s… a fair point, I guess?
Though I’ve never seen it mentioned by anyone on this forum.
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I don’t think no one is trying to understand your struggles, I think most of us simply don’t understand what you are trying to say.
If I understand your last message correctly, you simply think learning about hiragana as a language. Hiragana is not a foreign language to Japanese, it is part of Japanese. There is no better way to represent Japanese sounds than the native Japanese phonetic writing systems. No other language will tell you exactly how every sound sounds. Japanese people themselves use hiragana to explain kani pronunciation. にゅう is much more intuitive than nyuu imo
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Maybe the userscript and mnemonic artworks in the following thread could help you get started in the first few levels. It has the intermediate step you find missing included in most of the earlier artworks:
I struggle to understand what your problem is.
Either you still don’t know hiragana - which is needed for representing the sounds of a kanji-, or you just don’t know how to type hiragana with a standard keyboard,
or you ask for so called romaji - which would be a bad idea for learning actual Japanese.
→ If you still need to learn the hiragana, Brave-foot already posted a link to help you out.
→ If you need to learn how to type hiragana with a standard keyboard, the posted link covers that too (just take a look under every kana where the sound is represented in romaji aka these letters you are reading right now. That is how you type them in.)
→ If you ask for romaji on WaniKani, I doubt your plea will ever be heard, since that is the worst way of reading Japanese sounds. Because, as Adi-M already explained, hiragana as a Japanese native writing system is the best way to represent Japanese sounds. “shi” or “chi” is not the same as し or ち.
If neither of these 3 possible meanings of your struggle is correct, please help us to understand better what the issue is.
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That’s what I was thinking, but I didn’t wanna comment on it lol
if hiragana is too difficult
could use katakana instead
ヌウ
ニユウ
ニュウ
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The secret is, kanji are components of a foreign language’s writing, and hiragana represent how they sound.
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Well we certainly could for on’yomis since that’s standard for a lot of dictionaries… There’s even a user-script for that 
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just for dyuun 
ミルクセーキ
ミルクシェイク
ミルク・セーキ
ミルク・シェイク
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@anon37645119. I’ve been on WaniKani for now 21 days. During that time I have been active on these forums. Before I started WaniKani I spent two weeks on Tofugu’s guides reading everything from, learning Hiragana and Katakana, to listen to their podcast explaining the history of Japanese language, and learning the guides on the recommended structures for learning Japanese as a native English speaker. I’ve communicated on these forums asking questions. I still considered myself a novice and when someone corrects me, I always remember that I’m the one who’s learning still and I have insufficient knowledge to even challenge anything anyone says.
People understand fully what you’re asking, but you don’t seem to understand what we’re trying to help explain to you. I promise you every interaction I’ve had on these forums has been positive. This community is welcoming and polite, and additionally, very knowledgeable and wise.
I have not read a single comment that has made a personal attack, insult or belittling comment. Everyone so far has only given you facts about learning Japanese. Your second comment on this page shows you’re already on the defensive - no one is interested in insulting you or hurting your feelings, this is not the place on the internet that people have any interest in that type of behaviour. We’re here because we love Japanese, and want to learn, and we also want to be around people who share this passion. Please take a moment and ask yourself if you actually know how to learn a new language like Japanese, and be honest. Because I certainly never did.
You’ve got so many people in this forum helping you. I just hit level 3 yesterday, and I can already identify Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana in writing. Granted not enough to understand, but enough to know that what is the Kanji, what is the Hiragana. Why is this Katakana and not Hiragana… etc.
They’re giving you the answer but their answers are not helpful to you because it’s clear to me, you’ve misinterpreted the way in which WaniKani is used.
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As I explained earlier, hiragana is prerequisite knowledge. If you know hiragana, you know that しち is “shichi”. It can be nothing else. “Shichi” is しち and しち is “shichi”, it’s a direct one-to-one correspondence. There’s no confusion here. As with others in the thread, I’m getting increasingly confused as to why you’re confused.
(There are, to be fair, examples where it’s not a one-to-one correspondence, where the romaji-to-kana conversion is ambigious. For example, “senen” could be either せんえん or せねん - for this reason, the romaji is often written with an apostrophe, sen’en, if the first reading is intended, but this is one of many reasons why it’s unwise to continue to lean on romaji when you have hiragana to work with.)
That’s not additional information, that’s prerequisite information. The card has already informed you that 入 is pronounced にゅう, it doesn’t also need to add all of the kana combinations that it’s not pronounced as.
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In theory it could be both, depending on the lexemic boundary (that is, is ぬう part of a sale meaning, or is ぬ and う in different entities).
For ぬう in particular, I don’t see any instance where it could be nû rather than nu.u (I only know there is a verb ぬう, which is not in my active vocabulary so I’m not sure of the pronunciation).
That being said, the difference between long sound and two same sounds is quite blurry.
In all cases it is two mora anyway.
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ぬう as a sequence is quite rare: the jisho.org wildcard search only has:
- 縫う the verb
- 絹雲母 (きぬうんも) , which is apparently a mineral named “sericite” in English (and sufficiently obscure that I haven’t encountered it before in English, let alone Japanese)
- a few phrases where the ぬ negative form of a verb is followed by the word うち, e.g. 経たぬうちに (たたぬうちに)
- ぬうっと , an adverb for suddenly and unexpectedly appearing
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Why are new learners so hostile these days lol
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The Concoction
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