by Arline Lyons | Jul 22, 2015 | Basic Information
Don’t be alarmed if a translator working from Japanese to English asks you how to pronounce (or read) a personal or place name. This isn’t a sign that they lack basic knowledge of the language, but rather a comment on how complex Japanese names can be. The...
by Arline Lyons | Jul 22, 2015 | Basic Information
Japanese uses three alphabets: kanji, derived from Chinese pictograms, and hiragana and katakana (collectively referred to as kana) two phonetic alphabets made up of simpler glyphs. 薔薇 (kanji) バラ (katakana) ばら (hiragana) rose Katakana is most often used for foreign...
by Arline Lyons | Jul 15, 2015 | Basic Information
Japanese can be written in English letters using a system called romanisation, which maps Japanese sounds onto the Latin alphabet. There are several varieties of romanisation which produce slightly different versions of the same Japanese word due to differences in how...
by Arline Lyons | Jul 15, 2015 | Basic Information
Japanese uses single vowels, consonant + vowel sounds with modified versions, and one lone consonant. The main set of sounds can be represented on a five by ten grid, often called the 五十音 (gojūon) – literally, “fifty sounds”, along with modified...
by Arline Lyons | Jul 6, 2015 | Basic Information
When Japanese doesn’t have its own word for something it can use one of its two phonetic alphabets to represent a word from another language. computer konpyu-ta コンピュータ But as Japanese has a limited range of sounds, some loanwords (such as those with a...
