How to Write Your Name in Japanese

the question I get asked the most is can you translate my name into Japanese I know having your name in Japanese is cool I have many things with my name embroidered in Japanese in this video I want to share with you and explain the process that it takes to translate Western names into Japanese because I think it's pretty easy now I say it's pretty easy if you know three things number one you have a basic understanding of the Japanese language specifically how to pronounce vowels and consonants number two you know the katakana which is one of the three writing systems in Japan and number three if you want to write your name in kanji then you need to know how to read and write kanji which I already made a video about that now in this video I want to explain specifically how to translate your name using katakana because that is the most common way that Western names and translated into Japanese okay so Japan has three writing systems the hiragana the katakana and kanji hiragana katakana together known simply as kana are Slavic scripts this means that each kana character correspond to one sound in the Japanese language unlike kanji these characters have no meaning these sounds are always with a consonant and vowel or just about they both contain 46 characters the difference is that the hiragana is used for native words while the katakana is used for foreign wars for this reason when translating western names into Japanese at econo is used this is the katakana you read it from top to bottom and write the left on the right column here we have the vowels 5e ooh a O on the top are 9 consonants these consonants are then combined with each vowel to create the sound of each character the last character is used for the end sound like any other language there are combinations exceptions and other factors that will alter the basic pronunciation of a syllable the katakana is no exception for example a small alteration to the character such as placing two dots in the upper right hand corner changes the consonants k 2g s Z T 2d and HTTP there are also combinations of multiple characters to create new sound for example when combining D with yeah creating the Sun - yeah instead of Riga notice that when this happened the second character is slightly smaller than the first before you write your name in katakana you need to convert the pronunciation of it to match the Japanese language to demonstrate this I'm going to translate two names one will be easy to do the other one not so much the first thing I'm going to translate is Monica this one is super easy because when we split Monica into syllables we have more new God each one consists of a consonant followed by a vowel if you look each syllable in the katakana we can easily write Monica like this the second name I'm going to translate my wife's name Rachel this one is not as easy as Monica let's see why when we break down ratio into syllables we have Ray Chow in this case it's important to understand the Japanese pronunciation we can't use the character bra because in English this is pronounced ray therefore we need to use the characters drag 'if the second syllable has some challenges as well the sound chain doesn't happen in the Japanese language although shoe and she do the L sound doesn't happen either usually a character from the bar column is used to represent the L sound this is because in Japanese ours are very soft since we can't find a character that sounds like a check I'm going to have to make some combinations first I'm going to use the character for cheek next I'm going to use the character for a and then I'm going to use the character for rule to mimic the L sound at the end so we have gel now let's put it all together and we have nature as you can see they zero doesn't sound exactly like ratio but it's close we can say that Lake Jarrow is the Japanese version of Rachel I would like to point out that I could use this combination the character Chi with a small egg next to it to create check but it is not natural and if I wanted to write it in kanji I won't be able to because they are any kanji pronounce check

Channel: Gohitsu Shodo Kai

Views: 1,099,220

Rating: 4.9353123 out of 5

Keywords: Shodo, Japanese, Calligraphy, Japanese Calligraphy, Kanji, Art, Japanese Language (Interest)

Id: _N70PCZ9Ad4

Length: 6min 24sec (384 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2015