Katakana

Katakana is one of three Japanese syllabary (the others are hiragana and kanji) used when writing in Japanese. The basic katakana syllabary consists of 48 syllables with approximately another 70 additional sounds being made by using combinations of the basic 48 syllables.

Katakana is used to write non-Chinese loan words ( words borrowed from another language ie. video), onomatopoeic words, in telegrams, for emphasis (the equivalent of bold, italic or upper case text in English), to write Ainu, a language spoken on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and for foreign names.

The tables which follow show the katakana syllables with their romanised pronunciations beside them. To make up your name, you need to break it down into its component syllables and then make as near a phonetic match as possible. . This is not an exhaustive list of the katakana syllables. If you need one that I don’t have on the site contact me and I will put it in.

Some pronunciation tips

Vowels

A             as in cat
E              as in pet
I               as in pit
O             as in go
U             as in full
AI           as the y in my
EI            as the ay in pay

Consonants

There is no equivalent to the letter c. Use k for a hard sound and s for a soft sound.

If your name has an r followed by a consonant such as Marco it is common to omit the r sound and use a vowel extender mark so Marko becomes ma-ko.

Names ending in a consonant other than ’n’ such as Des, should be transformed to ‘De su’ for the purpose of conversion into katakana. Certain sounds are not reproduced too well in Japanese, such as the ‘l’ in Bill, and this should be converted to ‘Bi ru’ where the ’r’ sound is used to represent the ’l’.

Of course if you have been fortunate enough to have a Japanese person translate your name for you then you can use the katakana they have given you.

For further information on katakana please see the following links