alt Hacker News> I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”.
That is exactly the problem. Japanese doesn't distinguish between 'shi' and 'si', so all you're really gaining by pointing that out is learning how to correctly romanize Japanese, in a single system. Instead of learning the language you're learning how to represent the language in a foreign way.
The rule 0 of learning a language is to get rid of the crutches as soon as possible. Use their native writing system (or if they're one of the latin alphabet users, use their pronunciation rule), learn words of the target language using said language, and learn how to formulate concepts with the language rather than translating it from what you already know. Crutches should only be used to get to this point and no more. If you do that, details like 'si' and 'shi' are not even worth mentioning. Romanization methods have their own goals, and rarely is it about facilitating language learning.
I am literally saying in the article:
> this is actually completely intentional. some purists may dislike that, but [..] i think it provides a much clearer intuition for Japanese verb conjugation than writing it in hiragana.
You are that purist that I’m talking about. I get your argument. I just think it’s a non-issue in my chosen pedagogical approach to convey what I wanted to move on. People unaware of how romanization works will nod at it and move on. People aware of it will not have issue with it. People with opinions about proper way to teach the language are the ones that will get stuck on this.
The article is engineer-brained. It’s for people like me. It’s not for the people you’re teaching, assuming these strong opinions come from you being a teacher.