User blog comment:Plexioth- xD/Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate/@comment-69.140.237.23-20120219224852/@comment-4819590-20120221071013

Like I said, at this point it totally doesn't matter, at least if it is given a western release the names might be changed a bit. I live in Japan, so I know the monsters by their Japanese names. Japanese (at least in the case of hiragana and katakana) are read phonetically, so we always know how to pronounce them. There is the standard way to romanize these sounds (its called the Hepburn style I believe), which is what we all learn in school, but in the case of something like Zinogre, it can be totally twisted. Most of the time a Japanese native speaker wouldn't know how to pronounce something like that without katakana written with it as well, which is always the case with something like this. They know how to pronounce it since they've seen it written in Japanese anyway. Same goes for something like McDonalds, or Microsoft.

About the famous "silent u", I never really thought of it as silent in the way most people hearing that would. In Japanese we never think of letters as silent, just...how can I put it..."glazed over" I guess is a good way of putting it. Like "desu" meaning "it is" (kinda...never really thought about a good translation for it), I still say a "u", but its really quick. A lot of young girls really emphasize the "u" though. haha it all depends on the person. Anyway, long story short, if you think there is a possibility that the game will be localized for the west, just think of the current names as placeholders for the ones you will be using later. I'm generally not real nitpicky about these things anyway. For me when I want to know how to pronounce a name in a game, I go to a Japanese site to look it up, but since localized versions change the names anyway, I really don't mind all the nicknames and weird spellings for non-Japanese versions. Something to note as well, the Japanese like weird spellings anyway for products and game characters when written in roman letters, but it doesn't mean they will know how to pronounce it without katakana accompaniment to let them know how to read the sounds. Just an interesting cultural quirk that I got used to a long time ago. I've even done it myself for place names in other languages or products from other countries. I'll look it up on a Japanese wikipedia for example and pronounce it their way.