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I write fanfiction, some of it based on anime. There is the Japanese word うん,
used to casually indicate agreement, very familiar to anyone who pays
attention to the audio in subtitled works.

I am wondering whether there is any common practice for spelling this word in
works written in English. The only example I know of is Sara Backer’s
_American Fuji_. She taught English at Shizuoka University for several years
and is clearly very conversant with Japanese; in this novel, she spells it
_Ng_ in italics.

Does anyone know of other works in English that use this word? Has anyone
noticed a trend?
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2020-01-07T09:40:30.147
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2020-04-19T14:05:07.503
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question
words expressions rōmaji
How have writers in English spelled うん?
This may be a somewhat controversial, but I'm not really a fan of Sara
Backer's take on the spelling. For the lay man, _Ng_ will most likely receive
the normal 'N' pronunciation with a hard 'g' sound following it (like in
'golf'). However, knowing what I do about the language, using a soft 'g'
actually does get the sound phonetically written into English script.

The problem is that most spellings of うん will probably be misread by regular
English speakers.

When I lived in Japan for a couple of years, I developed the habit of saying
'うん' to English speakers in normal _English_ conversations. Because we usually
both had a strong Japanese background, we knew what it meant. However, when I
returned to the states, I started to get weird looks from the people I was
talking to. They seemed to understand what I meant by 'うん', but it was still
off-putting enough that it occasionally lead to questioning looks.

So in my opinion it depends on the target audience.

If you're writing to an audience that has moderate Japanese experience (or
greater, of course). You could use ' _Ng_ ,' but I would give some
consideration to using ' _un_ ' instead. The only issue is that ' _un_ ' will
likely also be misread. Nither spelling is going to get rid of the natural
English tendency to misread what is written, but if you could find a way in
the text to explain what you mean by ' _Ng_ ' or ' _un_ ,' that should at
least be helpful to the reader.

As @Aeon Akechi points out /m/ is a pretty good way to write it out in
phonetic English. For the target audience with Japanese experience, you might
be able to avoid misreadings by just writing ' _m_ ' whenever you'd use a
Japanese うん.

If you're writing to an audience that has little to no Japanese experience, I
would probably suggest that you use the English equivalent of 'uh-huh' or
'yeah.' The benefit of this approach would be that you would be able to avoid
confusion in your target audience. The downside is that it feels less
Japanese, so you'll have to find another creative way to incorporate the
Japanese culture and feel.

* * *

**EDIT 4/19/20:**

So I was reading the English translation of Musashi, and I came across how
they translated うん into English, and I have to say that I found it pretty
satisfying. This is another option you may want to consider, especially
because it appears to have been done before in translated works from Japanese
to English:

[![Musashi
Excerpt](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DuguT.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DuguT.jpg)
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