Why is it standard practice to use "ha" when you are translating は{wa} to
Romaji? This has always confused me. これは... is pronounced "Kore wa" but when
you write it out you write "Kore ha". Hiragana は{ha} when used as a particle
is pronounced "wa" so why do we not write "wa"?
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2012-09-03T17:22:01.703
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hiragana rōmaji
Using "ha" instead of "wa" with QWERTY keyboards
Every kana has a "set" romaji in the qwerty layout, even if it doesn't always
make sense from an English perspective. For example づ is "d-u", even thou it's
pronounced closer to "zu".

The instances where a kana is not pronounced how it looks (as far as I know)
are limited to は when it acts as a particle. If you're just starting out, you
might find this confusing, but it really become second nature to read or
pronounce は properly. Compare that to English's spelling/pronunciation!

If one kana had multiple ways to type it, it would become complicated. For
example, to say ３時半, and you could type, "s-a-n-j-i-w-a-n" you'd just be wrong
and confused.

Also, I can't tell if this is causing you confusion, but Japanese people use
qwerty keyboards just like in America. There is a layout where each key is a
different kana, but I've never met anyone who uses it.
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2012-09-03T18:06:41.410
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Because computers cannot read your mind. When you type "wa", the computer
cannot decipher whether you mean わ or は, so it was decided that わ would be the
only way. You could argue that you could develop a system to perform 変換 based
on context, but I would imagine that any attempt would fail. Also, if you
don't like this system, you can always use かな入力 (mainly used by people who
don't understand ローマ字), so when you hit the は key, you will always get what
you want.
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2012-09-03T23:02:40.733
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Or, to put Jesse Good's answer another way: When the romaji input was fixed it
was probably decided it was more efficient to make human's input h-a rather
than further complicate the programming and avoid additional time to perfom
変換.

Even if this could be done with modern programming I don't expect it is more
likely to change than the QWERTY keyboard layout, which was designed to
slowdown the input to a mechanical type-writer and reduce problem of the
letter-hammers jamming.

（A better question would be why is the "wa-particle" the hiragana は and not
わ？）
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2012-09-04T00:03:32.833
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2012-09-04T08:41:46.437
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Because of the way IMEs are designed. All Japanese IMEs based on romaji that I
know of (roughly) divide the keyboard-to-script transformation into two
conceptual parts:

  1. romaji-to-kana. This part is usually deterministic, i.e. no romaji combination gives more than one option of kana.
  2. kana-to-(kanji or kana or whatever). This part is not deterministic, and requires the user to choose between different renderings.

There is no reason why the two steps couldn't be combined into one non-
deterministic step, i.e. directly from romaji-to-(kanji or kana or whatever),
but given that Japanese already has many homophones, this would probably only
add to the confusion when choosing between renderings.

Japanese doesn't have one single universal romanization scheme which everyone
agrees upon. And even if they did, that scheme might not be the best to use
for input. Some romanization schemes try to be (somewhat) true to
pronunciation, some try to be true to phonemes, and some try to be true to
(kana) orthography. I think it's fairly natural that the ones used for input
are somewhat true to orthography. For example, there's no pronunciation which
renders as "ッァ", but that doesn't mean that you cannot have reasons to type
this.

As for why you saw someone write the particle は as "ha" in handwritten notes,
my best guess would be that that person frequently uses IMEs with romanized
input, and therefore that came more natural to them.
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2012-09-04T05:24:22.073
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