Tempura?

Alright, I have recently run into confusion with this word. It's a Japanese dish... or I think it is. I'm fine with the pronunciation but what confuses me is the spelling. I thought in Japanese you could not have constants together like that. I know you can have double constants like tte (って) or n and a sound like nde (んで) and if you combine two hiragana such as kyo (きょ) but but I don't get is the mp and the p being together. Tem_pura. Is this word just translated wrong or am I missing something? An explanation would be great. Thank you.

The Japanese ん sound slightly changes when combined with certain sounds... てんぷら is an example of that sound change which is why it is written with an m in english. Although literally it's written Tenpura but pronounced more like Tempura so yeah... So no, your not going crazy, it's a slightly pronunciation change that caused whoever to create the romanization of that word to mess it up.

Konnichiwa! ん('n') changes its pronunciation depending on the hiragana syllabary that follows it. When ん('n') is either followed by one of the hiragana's in the 'P' row ぱぴぷぺぽ('pa', 'pi','pu','pe','po') or one of the hiragana's in the 'B' row, this changes its pronunciation to that of an 'm', so based on this rule, ん('n') is written with an ‘m’ in Romaji such as in: てんぷら　tempura しんぶん　shimbun がんばってgambate -Sayaka ;)

I didn't get it....

Rezy-san, The best way is to simply focus on the Hiragana - and not worry too much about how it is written in Romaji. Romaji is only to help Japanese learners become familiar to the Japanese sounds - that is, so that they me be able to read and sound out Japanese. However, in Japan, the 3 main scripts are Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. When you read out てんぷら - is it not easier to say TEMPURA, with a 'm' sound, rather than a 'n' sound? - Sayaka ;)