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Davenport's avatar

Are you familiar with "The Singlish Affair"? It is about Japanese government officials during WW2 developing plans for writing English using Kanji for use in the US and other English speaking countries following Japanese victory in WW2. The Sinologist John DeFrancis wrote about it here and describes how the system would have worked:

https://international.uiowa.edu/sites/international.uiowa.edu/files/file_uploads/defrancis_1984_singlish.pdf

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Davenport's avatar

It would be interesting if you reviewed the book "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma" by William Hannas. It seems related to many of the issues you're encountering in your studies:

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html

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Davenport's avatar

Yes, though the different Romanizations of Japanese are all very similar and typing romaji for Japanese is not very difficult since Japanese phonetics are very simple e.g. it has the same basic 5 vowels as in Spanish, Italian, etc.

Romanization of Korean is indeed a mess as you say, though typing in Hangul is very easy as the number of letters are roughly the same as the Latin alphabet.

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