Three Styles to Choose from
Japanese writing system is composed of three styles; Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana.
Usually, Kanji or Katakana is used when converting foreign words into Japanese writing.
Katakana represents “Sounds of words”
Katakana is a useful writing style that was created in order to convert foreign words into Japanese writing.
Foreign words are converted into Katakana based on their sounds.
Let’s take the word “desk” as an example.
It sounds “de-su-ku” to Japanese people.
When you convert these sounds into Katakana, you get
“デスク(de-su-ku)”.
Kanji represents “Sounds and Meanings”
It’s easy to replace English words with Japanese words if they are on the dictionary.
What’s difficult is converting the name of person.
Just like Katakana, the words are converted into Kanji based on their sounds.
However, there are several Kanji symbols that sound the same but with different meanings.
Let’s try to convert the sound “yo” into Kanji.
When you look up the Kanji symbols with the sound “yo”, you get;
夜(yo)
世(yo)
四(yo)
与(yo)
余(yo)
…
There are many Kanji symbols with the same sound but each has different meaning.
Combining Kanji symbols based solely on their sounds without knowing their meanings
will end up creating the meaningless string of Kanji symbols.
So it is very important to select Kanji symbols appropriately based on their sounds and meanings.
Please see the related article on converting the name into Japanese writing.
Thank you for reading to the end.
