Hello,
As I'm helping Rudders and the Wayland team demo Bushido on the weekend, I figured I'd best know how to actually pronounce words like Kairai, Yurei, etc, so I don't sound like a numpty and I thought there must be some japanese speakers on the boards who could help me out! I read through a Japanese phrase book and learned about pronouncing all vowels seperately, and the soft 'a' sound, and the half rolled 'r' but that makes Kairai come out like kar-y,rrar-y? anyone able to correct me?
On that note, is Ki pronounced like key (as in tai chi) or Kai to rhyme with tie?
Kee. Its a sharper sound than key.
I pronounce it a Chi as Tai - Chi.
Kairai - Ki (as in Wayne Rooneys' child) - Ray
Yurei - Your - Ree.
The thing to remember is we made it all up and so pronounce however is best for you, no one can tell you your wrong as its fictional :)
"To a real warrior, power perceived may be power achieved."
Sharper as in quicker and snappier?
I figured it had roots in the Chinese (tai) chi thing as much as the connection with western enerGY, and about "life force", which is essentially what Ki is in game.
Have done Tai chi for a year or so myself, so its funny seeing the connections, esp in the poses of some of the minis!
Here's how I would pronounce yurei and Ki. (Forvo is a fun resource.)
You can also get Google to speak to you.
Set it to translate from japanese, check the 'Allow phonetic typing' box. Write kairai, and press enter to confirm the characters it proposes. (This will also show you that it means 'puppet', if you didn't know:)
Then press the little loudspeaker symbol, and there you are.
You are now ready to fake japanese as good as the next gamer.
I follow the rules of bushido. I am a bushi.
Actually, that's how I wouldn't pronounce it.
Nonetheless the Google translator is a good idea that saves up a lot of time
instead of trying to explain japanese phonetics with english phonetics as example... 
However be careful, if you just limit to write yurei in the google translator you'll obtain the same pronunciation as the one heard in Forvo, If the Dev team was intending to mean "ghost", cult of the ghost as name of the faction, as I always had assumed since the beginning of the game, then the pronunciation given by Forvo and Google Trans. is wrong. It's not that both applications are wrong but just that the user didn't introduce the right word. That happens because yurei intended as ghost, that "u" is a long vowel. When written in romaji, that is, japanese written using romanic characters, long vowels are represented with the next sign over the long vowel ^ So it is yûrei but that long vowel is lost when the word is westernized. So in order to write the right word in Google Translator you must type: yuurei then it will appear the word 幽霊 as the first option.
http://translate.google.com/#ja|en|%E5%B9%BD%E9%9C%8A that's a pronunciation I fully approve for yurei.
Keep in mind the same would happen with the word tokyo for example, Should you directly type tokyo the application would not recognise the word. Once again it's a matter of long vowels, actually a pair: it's tôkyô, so you should type toukyou and you would get 東京. To sum up, my point is that regardless of how amazing are nowadays language applications and translators, if you don't have certain level of knowledge about a given language, you might still making lots of mistakes, so I wouldn't be so confident the software solves all.
That's my 0.02$
Yep. Hard to explain the pronunciation with words really.
Key, would sound out Keeeeeee Wheras Ki should sound like Kee.
Thats about as sussinct as I can make it when typing.
Ps. It is different from Chi, (Or Qi, as it can also be translated) in that it is the japanese word for the same belief in "internal power".