@mormonwarrior said:
Sidenote: What in the world is the difference between yo-shi and yosh-i? Those sound identical to me and the argument is dumb.
Rules for Japanese pronunciation are not at all difficult, English speaking people just don't know how to interpret words that are romanised.
Yo and Shi are two phonetic characters. Part of the Japanese alphabet, so to speak. よし. The adopted kanji have several meanings:
From Japanese 吉 "good luck", 義 "righteous", or 良 "good". I have met grown men named Yoshi and this is what their name means.
"Yosh-" is an expressive term that simply means "all right!". You drop the ending vowel when speaking, but it would still be the Shi character when written out, because there is only one "sh" consonant character in the entire alphabet. Ultra-common words like "desu" are the same. You can omit the final vowel sound, but the character is always "Su", in the S column. (Some people are confused by the romanised character "Tsu", that's a problem of trying to understand a language through translations instead of native characters.)
Fundamentally, and I will murder any fool who disagrees with me (except maybe @pepsiman), the Japanese language does not depend on syllable emphasis and intonation the way that Chinese and western languages do. English has heteronyms (DESert - arid region, and desERT - to leave). Japanese is mainly homonyms. You can say YOshi and yoSHI and it's all the same if you don't mind sounding like a silly foreigner.
Emphasis and intonation in Japanese are emotive and expressive, and while there is absolutely such a thing as regional dialects and accents (like saying Ti instead of Chi), it doesn't change the meaning of words as long as both parties understand what is being said. Sometimes people will draw with their finger in mid-air if they are referring to a specific kanji meaning of a common word. All communication is context.
In Mandarin you can insult someone by dropping a syllable's tonal pitch instead of raising it. Hence a lot of confusion by how all Asian languages treat pronunciation.
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