It's a soft "g". The pronunciation of the first katakana character in his name is "ji". There is no argument about it.
Says it a couple times at the end here. I love how unimpressed Metalhawk is with the whole affair in this clip. "lousy Ginrai, used to be MY team... *mutters mutters*"
Shouldn't your second and third options have the same pronunciation? Soft "g" as in gin "J" sound as in John
I've heard people put more emphasis on the 'j' type sound, like drawing it out some. That's why I put 'shin' as an example.
To this American’s ears, the pronunciation always sounded like “Jin-die.” But that’s probably a result of a rolling “r” that doesn’t quite come out as that letter.
It's really unusual for a Japanese character name to use a soft G, but for some reason they did. I could be mistaken, but the name seems like a play on Raijin, the name of a Japanese storm god. Raiden is an alternate name for the same deity.
Think of it like alcohol. Gin Rye That's how you pronounce it. Really, the confusion is because Takara romanized the name wrong back in 1988. They should have spelled it Jinrai. Thus the alternate spelling when you look it up on Amiami and some other places (where they have the figure listed as "Jinrai"). If you look up a katakana chart and compare it to what's written on a Transformer box, it's a "J" sound, not a hard G.
Exactly. It's much like how on a large amount of old Japanese Dragon Ball merchandise, they spell the main character's name as "Gokou", which would be pronounced "Goko" if we went by standard romanization rules. "Ginrai" is the official romanized spelling of the name from Takara, but that doesn't mean it is pronounced that way.
