Transcribing Your Name in Japanese


This page is for learning how to write your name in Japanese. Foreign names are written with katakana, so you should learn katakana before going on. You will also need Japanese fonts for viewing this page.

Japanese and English sounds differe significantly. Therefore, your name won't always sound exactly as it does in English. But we tend to do the same things to their names as well. Usually, you want to try and spell out your name phonetically, but you will need to cut some corners to make it fit.

For example, my name is Michael and so I want to sound it out in Japanese. "Mi" sounds like マイ。 "Chael" sounds like "kul." There is no sound equivilant to the "u" sound there, so we can change it to "e." So we have マイケ。 Lastly, we have a lonely "l" sound. There's two problems here. One, we cannot have a consonant not followed by a vowel (except n` of course) and two, Japanese doesn't have an "l" sound. The Japanese transcribe both English "l"'s and "r"'s as "r"'s. So we change it to an "r." Lastly, most of the time, whenever we have a consonant at the end or followed by another consonant, we add a Japanese "u" sound after it. Many times the "u" is whispered in Japanese, making it a good choice for blank sounds.

There are a few other general rules for translating your name.