In before, "7-11 Mama"!

*looks at screenshot*

Hmm.. I guess that's what it is...

Wow.  Whoever romanized the name is pathetic.

It would be either Minna no Combini or Minna no Comvini.  (I've never seen anyone write it the second way.)

At any rate, the title means "Everyone's Convenience Store".

Well, the short answer to "Why aren't they writing things the way I want!!" is that scene release groups usually subscribe to the GameFAQs method of romanization (ie; they go to GameFAQs and see how they romanized it).

The long answer is this (a bunch of google searches):


There you go, the standardized way of romanizing that word only gets about 200k results while the way that made you all upset enough to call some dude who probably doesn't even know Japanese pathetic got nearly 2 million.

That's the power of GameFAQs folks, if you don't like it, you can spend all day editing info on their site.

wait... the real reading is Combini right?
well the publisher is same as Mama series, we'll see the title would be Mama Convience Store... man that sucks
anyway, since I'm bored with DS, this game will be my new game... I think...

The 'real' reading would be 'Conbini'. The reason 'n' becomes 'm' when we Englishize Japanese words (like tempura, which is written 'tenpura') is because English doesn't allow the 'n' sound to be next to the 'b' sound. There are some fairly long reasons why Japanese DOES allow this, but I don't want to bore you  

lol bore me...
it's nice learning a little knowledge of japanese and english XD

Or, in short - Combini and Comvini make absolutely no sense, while Conveni certainly does - considering the nature of the game.

Actually, Conveni makes lots of sense.

コンビニエンスストア = ko n bi ni e n su su to a = convenience store, they just drop the ensusutoa and left konbini, just like the one who has translated the name of this game, convenience store = Conveni! ^_^

Well... Japanese uses a moraic system to measure their syllable clusters... this basically means that all sounds in Japanese must be the same length... for instance, よ (yo) must be the same length as ス (su), when you speak them out loud.

Now to understand what this has to do with what were talking about before, you have to know that ん (n) is also one of these sounds that must be the same length as all others. So in the word "みかん" (mikan), you have to spend just as much time pronouncing the 'n' and you do the 'mi' and 'ka'.

OK, so it's important to know that 'n' takes up a full sound in Japanese (while English doesn't use that moraic thing I was talking about), now you can understand why Japanese doesn't have the same rules for word (and syllable cluster) formation as English does. For them, the word 'tenpura' takes up five sounds 'te.n.pu.ra' while in English, we make it into only three syllables: 'tem.pu.ra'.

But why does English make it into only three syllables? Well we take the original word: tenpura, and say "oh no, 'n' and 'p' can't be next to each other because it would take too long to pronounce. We'll make 'n' into 'm' because both 'm' and 'p' are pronounced the same way". Think about it- a 'p' is just an 'm' where you push air out of your lips*. Pronounce tempura the English way and then the Japanese way (ten-pura) and see which is easier. I don't know about Malay or Indonesian or whatever you speak, so maybe the Japanese way seems more natural, but to a native English speaker it isn't.

Japanese doesn't have a rule like this because of that 'syllable length' thing, and they see 'n' as perfectly fine in this cluster.

I guess I could have explained the better, but I would need to be in person, and have some charts and graphs ahahha. There's even this Japanese song where they try to teach kids the 'English' way to pronounce words.. that's where I came up with the tempura example.

Ah, so one more thing. Tempura is a native Japanese word that English made into tenpura. But what about 'Conbini'? That comes from (I'd like to think..) the English word 'convenience'. The thing is, Japanese doesn't have a natural 'v' sound (actually few langauges do), so when they can, they like to turn 'v' into 'b'. So Japanese turned "Conveni' into 'Conbini', and then because of our English rule, we turned 'Conbini' into 'Combini'!!! Pretty freakin' crazy!!!


*in some languages, like Korean and I think Hindi, there are two ways to pronounce a 'p', depending on how you use the air when making the noise. This makes languages like Korean really difficult for some people!!