Hello everyone.
I’ve been studying Japanese for a few months now, and I’ve asked a more experienced learner whether he often makes mistakes in spelling words using Katakana.
He basically told me that spelling words using Katakana can be done essentially as one likes, as long as it sounds like the correct word. That seemed a bit strange to me, as I’ve been learning “Katakana-Words” using the dictionary spelling.
The exact example was インフルエンザ. I spelled it as インフレンザ and he said that was totally fine. Is that true?
There’s sometimes more than one spelling, and it’s often going to be a bit ambiguous if something’s not already an established loan word in Japanese, because it’s all an approximation of a foreign pronunciation anyway.
That said, インフレンザ seems weird - it’s influenza after all, not infulenza. People may understand you, especially with context, but I’d definitely consider that wrong.
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It’s important to remember that while these are loanwords, they are still actual Japanese words at this point. That means they will have official ways of being spelled.
For an analogy into English, imagine if someone decided to spell buffet as bufay because “it’s a French word, I can spell it however I want in English”. That’s just not how it works. The word may have come from French, but now it’s also a proper English word and has a specific way of being spelled.
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