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Are there written systems (preferably international & standardized) that you
can use to depict how to pronounce any word from Japanese and any language.
Something similar to Romaji but one that can be used for any language?

Can't remember well but **back in a linguistics class, I thought they showed
me some kind of international alphabet (which just looked like modified Roman
alphabets with weird tildes, lines, and such) that you can use to break down
and identify any particular sound and pronunciation for any particular
language**. They may have called it a phonetic alphabet or something.

## Example

So, what I mean is if I want to show a Japanese person how to properly
pronounce "加油", I can turn to this international written system. The Japanese
person, in turn, can use the same phonetic notation to show how to pronounce
"Ganbatte".

## What I want

  1. Does such a phonetic notation exist?
  2. If so, can you provide a list mapping the sounds these characters make using that phonetic system? 

あ,い,う,え,お,か,き,く,け,こ,さ,し,す,せ,そ,た,ち,つ,て,と,な,に,ぬ,ね,の,は,ひ,ふ,へ,ほ,ま,み,む,め,も,や,ゆ,よ,ら,り‌​,る,れ,ろ,わ,ゐ,ゑ,を

Think on Wikipedia calls them the Hiragana base characters.

No Kanji though.

I hope that makes sense.
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katakana phonology kana hiragana
Does an international OR standardized phonetic alphabet/notation system exist to depict all the Hiragana/Katakana sounds?
This is what you're looking for: [International Phonetic
Alphabet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA)
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answer
1)Yes, an international standardized character alphabet exists for
transcribing the sounds of all human Languages. It's called the [International
Phonetic
Alphabet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet) and it
is maintained by the [International Phonetic
Association](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Association)
(both are acronymized as IPA). The most recent version of the alphabet was
created 1969 and their most recent and currently operative handbook, first
published in 1999, is the [Handbook of the International Phonetic Association:
A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic
Alphabet](http://www.amazon.ca/Handbook-International-Phonetic-Association-
Alphabet/dp/0521637511/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352521673&sr=8-1-spell).
Although as a guide, it's rather useless as I explain below, and certainly is
not for beginners. If you need to learn the IPA, pick up a good introductory
linguistics textbook, it should teach you the IPA and any background info you
need to understand the alphabet, like articulatory nomenclature. If you aren't
already familiar with baisc linguistics terminology, then the Handbook will be
a very difficult read.

2) There is a concept called [orthographic
depth](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth) which is a measure of
how well a language's orthographic symbols are in 1-1 association with the
language's phonemes. Phonemes are the finite discrete combinatorial units of
sound that are unique to a given language, though all languages draw their
phonemic inventory from essentially the same superset of phonemes since all
humans have the same speech organs (tongue, larynx, alveolar ridge, etc.) and
it is our speech organs which define what sounds are even possible. The entity
being represented and transcribed by an IPA symbol is a phoneme. It is
somewhat a curious thing how every language, including Japanese, possesses a
highly intricate and constantly changing set of rules that govern how these
phonemes can combine to produce the verbal form of words. This set of rules
describing how the phonemes pattern to form the words of a given language is
called a [phonology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonology) for that
language. Languages with the same inventory of phonemes can have different
phonologies ie different rules in how those phonemes are combined to produce
words. IPA symbols representing phonemes are concatenated and placed in
between two '/' characters to represent the phonemic representation of words.
So, <今日は> is phonemically transcribed as /koNːit͡ɕiɰa/ using the IPA. A
sequence of phonemic characters is called a string, a term borrowed from
computer science.

However, even though there is a standardized alphabet, the transcription for a
given phoneme, sound, or word can differ depending on how you use the
alphabet. The IPA is only an alphabet, it doesn't tell you how to interpret
and transcribe what you hear. It is still left to devise a scheme for
associating the IPA symbol to the phoneme you are hearing. And there is
usually several mutually contradictory schemes that you could define for
transcribing the phonemes of a given language's phonemic inventory that are
all consist with the IPA. It usually comes down to how you segment the speech
stream. When you study phonetics, you'll know what I mean. If you look in the
Handbook at the languages they exemplified, you'll notice it's referred to as
an "illustration of the IPA for language X". This is because there are
different ways to transcribe with the IPA. For example, sometimes you can add
diacritic marks to make the transcription more accurate, but only if you
really need that extra detail.

The IPA is only for transcribing phonemes, it says nothing about how a
language is to combine those phonemes to form words. In other words the IPA is
agnostic to any particular phonological theory.

Most kana are in 1-1 correspondence with pairs of phonemes, but several kana
are 1-1 with singular phonemes. So, <む> corresponds to the phoneme pair /mɯ/
but <あ> corresponds to the phoneme /a/. <ん>, however, is a little more
complicated to describe. It correlates with an underspecified phoneme, a
special type of phoneme that the IPA doesn't accommodate because it's a
language dependent phonological conception. There's no room to explain that
here. Because most kana are in 1-1 correspondence with a single or pair of
phonemes, kana is said to have a shallow orthographic depth, but it isn't
perfect 100% 1-1 correspondence when considering the entire Japanese script
and it also depends on how you define orthographic depth. These technical
definitions are important if you are trying to do something like getting a
computer program to read Japanese text and synthesize speech. Such a task is
called grapheme to phoneme (G2P) conversion.

Kanji on the other hand is more or less arbitrarily associated with phonemic
strings. In other words, when you encounter a novel kanji for the first time,
you cannot predict its phonemic correlate ie how it is pronounced. Because of
this Kanji is said to have a deep orthography.

You can type out IPA symbols then copy and paste them however you like using
this website <http://westonruter.github.com/ipa-chart/keyboard/> . This is how
I type IPA to include in web pages. You need to set your browser to view UTF
character encoding to see IPA characters. Do that if the IPA characters are
not rendering.

Since kana is orthographically shallow you can construct a list that maps kana
to IPA phoneme strings rather easily. But you need to establish your
transcription conventions beforehand, and to what level of detail you need to
transcribe. For these reasons, a phoneme to kana implementation is usually
created only for the application at hand.
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answer