Currently I have “Eiffel Tower” in my lessons (level 45) and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to write it in kana:エッフェル塔. Specifically, it’s the smallェ after the フ…what is the combination of English letters that enables this combo?
I can’t believe I’ve never run into this before, but somehow I missed it and I’m completely stumped. How does this work? Thanks to anyone who can help!
At least for me, to get エッフェル (or えっふぇる) I type “efferu” on my Romaji keyboard.
There’s フェ fe, ティ texi, ツァ tsa, ヴァ va, etc.
Fe will automatically give you フェ, but the key is to use x when you’re unsure. The next letter after x will become small. So something very unconventional like woxa becomes をぁ
fuxe or fe
But there are usually 2-3 letter combinations, like fe, thi, tso, qi, vi
Or “thi”, as someone taught me here a few months ago.
Also works with ‘L’, which is what I use, but either one works.
Except in WaniKani, where L is treated as equivalent to R… unless they changed that while I wasn’t watching.
Every time I completely blank on a kanji reading I just type “la” and it comes up as ’ぁ’. So yes something did change while you weren’t watching.
Now I’m curious, is katakana/imported words the only place where you see odd small vowel usage like this, or do some hiragana words do it too? My guess would be “no” since imported words tend to try and approximate the pronunciation of the words in its original language while “traditional” Japanese words don’t have to do that, but it seems like there’s always an exception to every rule.
Ah thank you, the X trick should be pretty useful going forward when I run into any similar constructions.
I never heard of x before. I always use l. l for little.
I hadn’t either until I tried Torii SRS, where you have to type x in order to make small vowels. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to type small vowels to type the word パーティー until I poked around the app’s settings and how-to’s. 
Pretty much just imported words, but you do sometimes see small vowels to prepresent drawn-out sounds, like じゃねぇ～, for example.
In cases like these, is the small vowel meant to indicate that the speaker’s voice is getting softer as the sound goes on? Is it any different from the usual “elongated sound”? (i.e. じゃねぇ vs じゃねえ)
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