aww please
wait i gave a short reply as to why its /m/ but mangago cut my comment? Sjshjaaj
Anyway, ん assimilates to the consonantal sounds that follow. Mayhaps the translator prefers /m/ so readers will know how to pronounce it properly. nbd
I took college Japanese and ny professor, who is native Japanese said very clearly that ん in "n". I also never (and I mean NEVER) saw it translated otherwise. Not in the textbooks or her hand written tests. She also deducted points for mispronunciation. Considering I had the highest grade in the class and still read Japanese relatively well (speaking is a different matter now that I'm out of practice), I'm 100% positive on this. Using the "m" pronunciation is a mistake made commonly in the 90s and seems to still need correcting...
Also, that totally was not meant to sound bitchy. I'm in a rush. Sorry if it came off that way!
Uh, no, no it's not. Romanized, hiragana, katakana or orally, it is only ever supposed to be "senpai", with an "n". I literally had an Otaku in my class ask about this because she was shocked and the my Japanese professor said that it has been heavily mistranslated due to English speakers not hearing them right. There is no word in Japanese that is "sempai". Literally if you were to translate that, it would mean something along the lines of "back m ぱい" because "se" means "back" most often, "m" is not a sound/letter on its own and "pai" is a suffix that needs to be attached to a corresponding term in order for it to be translated at all, otherwise it is read as is. If you are pronouncing it "sempai", you're not hearing what the speaker is enunciating and if you're writing it as "sempai", you're continuing a mistranslation that is decades old and needs to be corrected.
I know, didn't it kinda gave a suggestion that incest is popular in, this, particular dorm..?
A little bit. I took Japanese in college and my professor was a Japanese native, but she never mentioned something like this when discussing cultural differences. Kind of an odd thing
type it "senpai", not "sempai". It's 先輩, which us せんぱい in hiragana. It's super simple, but a really annoyingly common mistranslation.
Anyway. Anyone know why a dorm wouldn't allow relatives to share rooms? Honestly, I've never heard of that even in Japanese culture. Maybe it's to encourage socializing? Anyone know?