@heynow:
>1. ふ is a bilabial fricative. for english speakers, "fu" is as close as we can get to that.
This is something said by those that read a quick article on Japanese phonology, never having actually listened to spoken Japanese. /h/ before /u/ is
often realized as [ɸ], yes; it's often also realized as {h}, as [x̟], [x], or indeed even [f], depending on speaker, what follows after it, mood of the speaker, and anything else. Does
this here sound even remotely close to a voiceless bilabial fricative to you? That /hu/ in Japanese is supposedly always realized as [ɸɯ] is idealized theory that is far from the actual practice of spoken Japanese.
>2. ɕi is shi. Japanese people say shi. し is shi.
Again, theory, not practice. Many Japanese speakers just realize it as [si]
>this case doesnt matter for english either.
Yes it is, [z] is always contrastive from [dz] in English; in Japanese it never is.
>its based on english because english is the world language. there has to be a baseline otherwise nothing will ever get done.
English is the biggest language by speakers of any rough degree of competency, in order to be able to use the phonology as a baseline one would require very
high competency. Most speakers of English speak it with such a strong accent that many can't even differentiate between /s/ and /ʃ/ properly; Spanish and Mandarin have more speakers of such competency that basing the phonology thereon actually has merit.
Edit, I remember a particularly pathological case in
the opening line of Gabriel Dropout's theme — I feel English speakers would, were they not primed, interpret that line as "tensi no hane hilogete mina ni shukuhuku wo". In particular, note the clear articulation of the "w" in "wo" as is often done in songs; it is quite clearly so close to a pure glottal fricative there, and the /si/ is very close to an alveolar fricative, not quite there, but I feel the level of palatalization is so low that few Englishs speaker would independently come to consider it "shi" over "si" if not told in advance.
