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Western Names With Kanji

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From User	Message Body
EternalNightmare	Post #589116
Memento Mori Member 5:13 pm, Mar 1 2013 Posts: 294	Found this, found some others that seem to be just random generators or ben using pronunciations i know they dont have. The site is using some kanji i dont recognise and sense theres only pictures i cant put it in an translator. The name im looking for is Johan. Is this site any good or can someone help me put some nice kanji together that have the right pronunciation? ________________ "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown"
狂気	Post #589128
Member 8:38 pm, Mar 1 2013 Posts: 575	Use katakana. Using kanji for western names is outdated. It's purely phonetic and there's just no point when you can use katakana. If you think it's more cool with kanji, think again. ________________ さくら花主をわすれぬものならば吹き來む風にことづてはせよ
Pikapu	Post #589129
Mikasa&Rogue Member 8:42 pm, Mar 1 2013 Posts: 1889	Kanji...? That... that doesn't make much sense... Making your name into katakana, well that makes perfect sense.... Since in Japanese, they make Western words using katakana... But um. The katakana version of Johan... Would be like... ジョーハン... or ジョハン But I don't know if you pronounce it like "Jo" or "Yo" at the beginning... If you pronounce it like "Yo", It would be ヨーハン or ヨハン... Maybe you can google the kanji based on these katakana spellings...? I dunno.... ________________ Quote from LawX You are like the dense main character in a shoujo manga. Quote from Crenshinibon And you will murder someone one day, pika. If you're my daughter. PLAY WITH ME IN DIABLO 3! PM me for info
EternalNightmare	Post #589137 - Reply to (#589129) by Pikapu
Memento Mori Member 9:38 pm, Mar 1 2013 Posts: 294	Quote from Pikapu Maybe you can google the kanji based on these katakana spellings...? Makes perfect sense, been spending too much time googling for alternative answer to the problem to see the simplest solution ^^* ________________ "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown"
mogiks	Post #589139
Member 9:50 pm, Mar 1 2013 Posts: 727	Some non-Japanese people like to have their name spelled in kanji. It doesn't mean they're going to use it all the time instead of katakana, but even if they did, what's the problem? I believe quite a few foreigners who have moved to Japan have decided to use kanji for their name, for various reasons. I'm sure you can find some information about it on Google. There is certainly a historical precedent and it's done with some other words too, a practice called ateji. It's not a rare thing and apparently quite acceptable according to my experience. When I was studying Japanese at university, some Japanese exchange students I was chatting with offered to find some kanji to write my name phonetically. I can't remember precisely what they came up with but I have it written down somewhere. (Some of the kanji were quite obscure as it's not always easy to find a positive-meaning kanji that matches the phoneme you want - they had to use an electronic dictionary.) I continued to use katakana for writing my name but it was both fun and interesting to know. The course administrator (native Japanese) was also familiar with the practice and she would happily help out students who wanted to write their names in kanji. She tended to be rather practical so I think she would have dismissed it if she thought it was stupid. She told a story about a student called Ben who had decided to spell his name with 便. I believe it was because it was one of the first kanji we learnt, along with 利, so that together we could spell 便利 (benri - convenient). Unfortunately this kanji can also mean feces/poop. Anyway Nightmare, I only glanced at the website and my kanji knowledge is rather stale but what I saw seemed to be legit. You could try using a dictionary like jisho.org or tangorin.com.It should be quite simple to find a good katakana transliteration of your name - Pikapu's seem fine to me, you just need to decide if the first vowel is long or not. (And whether it starts with a J or a Y sound, of course.) If it's a long vowel you'll have to try looking for "jou" or "you". Then you just need to search these in the kanji dictionary and look through to choose a kanji with nice connotations. For example, this came up for "han". However I hope you're not going to get it tattooed or anything because these things often end up meaning something different to your intention
Pikapu	Post #589162 - Reply to (#589137) by EternalNightmare
Mikasa&Rogue Member 5:02 am, Mar 2 2013 Posts: 1889	Quote from EternalNightmare Makes perfect sense, been spending too much time googling for alternative answer to the problem to see the simplest solution ^^* Glad I could heeelpppp!! (: ________________ Quote from LawX You are like the dense main character in a shoujo manga. Quote from Crenshinibon And you will murder someone one day, pika. If you're my daughter. PLAY WITH ME IN DIABLO 3! PM me for info
coffee_11	Post #590993
Member 3:14 am, Mar 16 2013 Posts: 325	I don't find this cool at all. They just look so weird and stupid to someone who actually know the meanings of the kanji. It's even worse than Engrish.
rexytheking	Post #591621
Member 6:10 am, Mar 20 2013 Posts: 140	This is just like looking at the lisence plates and searching for my name again...why doesn't "rex" ever appear in anything? Oh well. Just type in "rex" in the japanese romanji keyboard and i get レ. cries
mogiks	Post #591696 - Reply to (#591621) by rexytheking
Member 7:05 pm, Mar 20 2013 Posts: 727	Quote from rexytheking This is just like looking at the lisence plates and searching for my name again...why doesn't "rex" ever appear in anything? Oh well. Just type in "rex" in the japanese romanji keyboard and i get ãƒ¬. cries X doesn't have a single character equivalent in Japanese. I've always thought it obsolete in English also as it can usually be replaced with ks or z. You'll probably have more luck with "Reks" -> レックス or　レクス.

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