Joel,
You are correct. In Roman characters, the
consonant sounds are alms always followed
by a vowel. Therefore, TSU-NA-MI. Basically
the Japanese vowels are A as apple, E as elephant,
I as it, O as ostrich, and U as wood. In case of
tsunami, the mild emphasis is at tsu (don't
remember the word for 'emphasis')
In case of zuiko, there are two consecutive vowels.
The second vowel (i) sound gets a bit stretched to
distinguish from u sound. Therefore, ZU-I-KO is
pronounced as zweekoh, where k-oh makes stretched
'o' and mild emphasis is at 'i'.
BTW, the above explanation could be wrong from
the linguist point of view. I am just trying to
be simple.
Jim Terazawa
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