In romaji, is りょう spelled 'ryou' or 'ryoo'?


This has been bothering me because I am writing a Memrise course and have been
implementing the romaji by hand for cases like these (since the Memrise
platform interprets りょう as 'riyou'). Intuitively, I would think that 'ryou'
would be correct, yet at the same time I've never seen りょお.




There are many different Romanization systems (ways of representing Japanese
in Latin ("English") characters), which may represent the same sounds in
Japanese differently.

**The "correct" spelling of Japanese is determined relative to the system you
are using.**

To answer your question for りょう, the most appropriate choice is probably
**ryou**. This is the standard way to represent this sound without using
special character/diacritics in the Hepburn Romanization system, which is by
far the most common Romanization system.

Hepburn Romanization has some variants:

  * In regular Hepburn, りょう would be **ryou** , with two vowel characters (o, u) put together to indicate the long vowel.

  * In Revised Hepburn, it would be **ryō** , with a macron to indicate the long vowel.

However, **ryou** is often the preferred variant because it doesn't take
characters which may not display properly with some fonts or may be difficult
to type (if you are making your own flash cards, for instance).

Other Romanization systems have different conventions. In the **Nihon-siki**
system for example, long vowels are indicated with a circumflex, so as りょう is
represented as **ryô**. In
[JSL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSL_romanization), which is designed for
teaching spoken Japanese, it would be **ryoo** , using doubled vowels.

Also, in reference to Memrise's choice of romanization: ["riyou" and "ryou"
comparison](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kana-changes-in-history/)

> _There didn’t used to be small kana, so if you saw a word like りよう, you’d
> basically just have to guess if it was pronounced riyou or ryou._
>
> _Given, you could often guess from context, but anything that gives_
> _clarity can’t be bad, right?_
>
> _After gendai kanazukai, you have りよう for riyou and りょう for ryou._




There are many different Romanization systems (ways of representing Japanese
in Latin ("English") characters), which may represent the same sounds in
Japanese differently.

**The "correct" spelling of Japanese is determined relative to the system you
are using.**

To answer your question for りょう, the most appropriate choice is probably
**ryou**. This is the standard way to represent this sound without using
special character/diacritics in the Hepburn Romanization system, which is by
far the most common Romanization system.

Hepburn Romanization has some variants:

  * In regular Hepburn, りょう would be **ryou** , with two vowel characters (o, u) put together to indicate the long vowel.

  * In Revised Hepburn, it would be **ryō** , with a macron to indicate the long vowel.

However, **ryou** is often the preferred variant because it doesn't take
characters which may not display properly with some fonts or may be difficult
to type (if you are making your own flash cards, for instance).

Other Romanization systems have different conventions. In the **Nihon-siki**
system for example, long vowels are indicated with a circumflex, so as りょう is
represented as **ryô**. In
[JSL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSL_romanization), which is designed for
teaching spoken Japanese, it would be **ryoo** , using doubled vowels.

Also, in reference to Memrise's choice of romanization: ["riyou" and "ryou"
comparison](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kana-changes-in-history/)

> _There didn’t used to be small kana, so if you saw a word like りよう, you’d
> basically just have to guess if it was pronounced riyou or ryou._
>
> _Given, you could often guess from context, but anything that gives_
> _clarity can’t be bad, right?_
>
> _After gendai kanazukai, you have りよう for riyou and りょう for ryou._

