Nihongo - Writing Your Name in Japanese

So, you want to learn to write your name in Japanese? Well, unlucky for you there are different ways to do so. The first is to use the Katakana syllabary. This is done for foreign names and objects. Your name would most likely be written in Katakana. This syllabary is very angular.

The second way to write a name is using Hiragana. This syllabary is the standard for “spelling” out words, as long as they are not foreign, or as additional characters added on to Kanji that give a different meaning to the Kanji. Hiragana has the same sounds as Katakana, but is more of a rounded, fluid-looking syllabary.

The third way, and the way most native Japanese write their name, is by using the meaning of your name to select the Kanji. This is the most difficult means of writing a name, as it requires knowledge of the Kanji to accurately select the correct characters. Since a Kanji can have more than one meaning, and most words have more than one Kanji, parents often select Kanji with a good second meaning when selecting the name for their child. If you would like to try this, I recommend using your favorite search engine to find the meaning of your name. Then, go to Nihongo Resources and search for the Kanji.

For the simplicity of this exercise, I’m only going to teach you the first two methods to writing your name. Katakana and Hiragana are easy to learn and use, and they are the fundamental building blocks of the Japanese language.

Lets start with a simple explanation of the sounds made in the Japanese Language. This will help you better pick apart your name and chose the correct characters. In Japanese there is no R or L sound. In Romanji, or Romanised Japanese, R makes a soft D sound. The vowels all have specific sounds that do not change.

A - Ah as in father
E - Eh as in cake
I - Ee as in seek
O - Oh as in low
U - Oo as is lose

The first step is to break your name out into syllables. Japanese does not typically have 2 consonants in a row (except for y), so you have to insert a vowel in between each consonant. The only consonant by itself is N. Here are a few examples of how you might break apart your name.

Dave - Da Vu since “Vu” is not a sound used in Hiragana you could substitute “Bu” or “Fu”
Christopher - Ku Ri So To Fu Ru
Nicholas - Ni Ko Ra Su

Once you have your name broken apart, you can easily pick the characters from the syllabary you want to use. Each Syllabary has 2 parts. The first is the common sounds, and the second are the more advanced sounds made by adding to the character or combining multiple characters. You can read more and view a complete character set by clicking either of the images.

Hiragana

Katakana

Name	Syllables	Hiragana	Katakana
Dave	Da Bu	だぶ	ダブ
Christopher	Ku Ri So To Fu Ru	くりそとふる	クリソツフル
Nicholas	Ni Ko Ra Su	にこらす	ニコラス

Picking over the charts is a time consuming task. For this reason, I use a great little feature on Windows that lets you type in other languages using the US keyboard. On Vista, go to control panel and Regional and Language Options. Then click the Keyboards and Languages tab. Click the “Add” button and select Japanese. Then go to the Language Bar tab. I have “Docked in the taskbar” selected, but you can make your own choice. Having it hidden will make it hard to use, and I don’t like it floating around. You can do the same thing on XP, but you have to have east Asian languages installed. Once you have the language bar visible, select the application you want to type in. This can be notepad, or even IE. Click the language bar, select Japanese. Then, make sure “Input Mode” is what you want to type in. As you type the syllabary, they will be replaced by the characters you have chosen. As you type a word, it will add the Hiragana until you press a space after the word, and then will input the Kanji for you. For instance, Samurai is a Japanese word. If I change my language to Japanese and type “samurai” I will first see this: さむらい - Samurai spelled in Hiragana. Then if I press space after the word is complete, I get 侍, the Kanji for samurai.

I’m not an expert at Japanese. It is my third language, and I can only speak a little of it, and can read practically none. It’s not that I don’t know anything about the language, it is simply that the tools I have focus on the speaking portion of the language, rather than the written. At home, I have 2 books to help me read and write the language, but I haven’t had time to actually study them. The first book is a grammar book that teaches basic sentence structure, called Japanese Step By Step by Gene Nishi. The only problem with this book is it uses romanji. The second book is a dictionary of all the Kanji. It has little phrases that are supposedly good at helping you remember the kanji. I haven’t really used this book yet, so I cannot attest to its usefulness. That book is Remembering the Kanji by James W Heisig.