A
system of
Japanese romanization that emphasises Western
pronunciation rather than consistency or corresponding exactly to the
Japanese scripts. Hepburn
romanization is the most common for casual uses of
Japanese, such as individual words in
novels (like
James Clavell's
Shõgun), Japanese-English
dictionaries, or
anime subtitles.
Hepburn really isn't a very good system for actually studying Japanese because it makes the language look irregular and confusing where it isn't. The advantage of Hepburn, however, is that Westerners can pronounce the romanized words easily. Take the romanization of a sentence in Hepburn versus the equivalent in JSL:
Kyõ ame ga furu deshõ. (Hepburn)
Kyoo ame ga huru desyoo. (JSL)
It will probably rain today.
The Hepburn version conveys the actual pronunciation easily, whereas the JSL version is impossible to pronounce correctly for the uninitiated. Note that those ~'s over the vowels are supposed to be straight lines. Also, an important thing to remember is that Japanese vowels are essentially prounounced as they are in Spanish (this is purely coincidence).