Yeah, it’s uncommon, but I’ve seen that そら reading used in other places too, but it’s mainly been in manga, anime, videogames, like in your example.
I wonder if it was a relatively recent fad to read it that way (like in the past 20 years or so?)
In the visual novel 9-episode, there’s a kind of a meta comment about that unusual reading.
One of the characters in the visual novel is a teenage girl who was born with the 天 name and そら reading. She intensely hates this name because because everyone usually just calls her てん instead of そら. She describes her name as a 厨二ネーム and she blames her parents for trying to be too edgy, like a 厨二病 teenager edge-lord who has read too much manga and comes up with cringe-worthy names thinking they are cool-sounding but they are not.
Because of that 厨二ネーム, she thinks that’s the reason why she’s grown up with an eccentric personality, and does strange goofy things, all because of the edge-lord-sounding name. She vows that when she becomes an adult, she’ll change her name to something more conventional.
The 9-episode visual novel came out a few years ago, so the girl’s parents might have grown up reading manga like Bleach. so I wondered if this was a kind of meta-joke on chuuni-souding names with weird readings.
I laughed when I read the teenage girl’s rant about her name because 厨二病 is something you usually attach to teenagers, but here, the teenager is criticizing her adult parents for being like that, so it’s a kind of role-reversal.
A bit related to that, I heard that you are restricted on what kanjis to use for names but not on how they would be read. So a person could be named 空 and have the reading be スカイ(sky)
I didn’t know about the kanji restriction but that makes sense.
As far as readings, yeah, you’ll definitely see some wacky ones. There’s also a lot names that use ateji and spell things phonetically with kanji like 真理亜 (Maria).
As I mentioned in my other comment, I assumed they were the same, but several sites said they were different things. “American coffee” is a weak brewed coffee, and Caffe Americano (アメリカノ) is a diluted espresso, which is actually stronger than most brewed coffees, at least in terms of caffeine content. Japan has アメリカノ too, and in my experience it’s much more common.
I also read on my iPhone and iPad using Immersion Reader with Yomichan-formatted dictionaries installed (I use a ton of dictionaries for better word coverage, both J-E and J-J monolingual dictionaries).
The advantage of using Immersion Reader is that you just simply touch the word, instead of selecting and highlighting it, so look-ups are quicker. Also in addition to installing multiple dictionaries, you can install frequency lists, pitch accent info, grammar guides, etc. When you look up a word, it’ll search through everything you’ve installed, so if you have pitch accent info and frequency lists installed, you can see the pitch accent of the word you touched, including the frequency number to help determine if it’s a word you want to learn.
Then you can save the word to your word list (it’ll also automatically save the definition and the sentence containing the word) so you can later export to Anki.
There also also third party tools that let you export your words from Kindle devices to Anki as well.
Note: some words with furigana may still be difficult to look up correctly on the Kindle and also Immersion Reader, if the formatting of the furigana is weird (a combination of the HTML code and the CSS styling). Sometimes the furigana isn’t clearly separated from the word, but instead jumbled together, so the dictionary may not be able to find the word.
Usually kanji-compound words are fine, but some words with kunyomi reading with a single furigana over it may cause some issues, but it depends on the book, and also it may depend on the particular word you are trying to look up.
To get around this, Immersion Reader has a search function that let you paste in the word (provided you copied it first), so you can fix the spelling (usually it means removing the furigana from the word) and it’ll search through all the dictionaries so you can add it to your word list. You can also edit each entry in your word list in order to manually add the example sentence, or to remove any unwanted dictionary entries.
Basically: Japan has tried to get rid of Kanji for convenience several times since the mid-19th Century. However, the first attempts which were mainly supported by the idea that regular civilians had low kanji literacy, amounted to nothing as kanji literacy among regular Japanese civilians was higher than expected.
For a while in the 20th century the 常用漢字 was actually named 当用漢字 or "provisional kanji list" as there was yet another push for education reforms that would gradually diminish kanji use. This was especially poignant before the arrival of personal computers, as there were no convenient input methods for kanji with typewriters.
But this was halted, once again, as personal computers provided a convenient and easy way for typing Kanji. Which meant that there was no real need to stop using it.
Ultimately, Japan hasn't abandoned Kanji because it hasn't been necessary. Most people already know how to read it, and it provides easier access and understanding of their historical texts.
Personally, I also think Kanji provides several advantages, such as an immediate understanding of vocabulary based solely on its kanji, or the ability to transmit more information in fewer characters.
The R pops up for the same reason "no smorking" is a thing. That O sound can get a bit confusing depending upon what's near it and usual patterns. It tends to crop up when the O is a long vowel in the furigana. The L/R thing is everpresent.
I think that’s a British influence. Rs in English words tend to get transcribed into katakana as long vowels to resemble British pronunciation, like parking → パーキング or art → アート. For a Japanese person who hasn’t formally learned a romanization system but knows a decent amount of these English → Japanese word pairs, it seems pretty reasonable to try to reverse the process by turning long vowels into Rs when writing Japanese in Romaji.
I started because I was super into Japanese music. This was almost 10 years ago already. But over time I’ve come to appreciate the lenguaje itself. Especially Kanji. Now I love it, and is the main reason why I still go out of my way to learn new vocabulary that I may never use.
That being said, I’m also trying to get into a Japanese university for my masters degree, and I use Japanese every day at my job, so it has financial and professional uses for me as well, and has sort of gone beyond a mere hobby at this point
Pronunciation is a majorly difficult thing for most native English speakers. I know people look at Japanese vowels and consonants and think “wow, only 5 vowels and a limited set of consonants and combinations, this is super easy!” And I guess it is easier than… Russian, Hungarian or French. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
But that’s mostly because they’re thinking of the “a” sound in English and the “o” sound, and so on. In reality, Japanese vowels are so radically different from English vowels, the vast majority of learners are going to completely butcher their pronunciation. You have to learn how to simplify all of them to their real sounds, because English vowels are usually rather complex, while Japanese are more similar to Spanish vowels. You also have to get rid of the plosives, which are also a dead giveaway when someone is a native English speaker.
As for what makes Japanese easier than others… hmm… well, not a lot, actually. I guess tenses and verb conjugations are considerably simpler than most Romance languages, for example. There are no gendered nouns but you have Kanji which is far more time consuming to memorise, and grammar structure and logic is usually completely different from English, and you’ll have to learn how to think differently to get your head around many concepts. This happens with most languages but even more so with Japanese.
So uh… the only thing that I think makes Japanese easier is that it’s arguably one of the most studied, documented and resource-rich languages to learn. There are millions of resources focusing on efficient and thorough study methodologies, as well as a lot of very popular media, books, TV shows, you name it. Cultural relevance is, in my opinion, Japanese’s biggest advantage, which is only rivalled by Spanish in the United States, or perhaps (I honestly have no clue but I’m guessing) French in the UK.
It has gotten better since the days of me posting various "Engrish" I would see that were posted officially on wayfinding signage in places like Tokyo and Shinjuku stations, Haneda Airport, rest areas along the national expressway system and so forth.
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