Japanese basics

~Japanese basics~
~日本語の基本~

Your name in Japanese

Chilling with kana

Write anything into this text field in order to convert it in kana.
If you use capital letters it will become katakana, or else it will be hiragana.

This may give you an idea of what kana are and how they work.

Help

If you want to increase your chances of getting a well translated name, please take care of the following advices:

Only use English alphabet
Remove the silent letters
Write your name phonetically
The phonetic is close to the Spanish~Italian one

Translate

You can use this translator but it still is a beta version.

First it does not have all the words so if a word is missing it will try to reproduce its English pronounciation in Japanese. You can check if it did that by using the "Listen" button.
It does not mean it is badly translated since in Japanese, many words come from English, but less that the amount this translator would tell you.

In other words, this is like google translate: far from being decent.

(sometimes the translator will be broken due to a server issue, if that happens retry later)

Convert numbers

In Japanese, you can use 2 types of numbers. The ones we use in English such as "1234..." and the Chinese ones.
No matter what system you choose, you will have to pronounce them by using the Chinese one. For example, the number 21 becomes 二十一 therefore they pronounce 21 with these characters.

These are the characters they use for counting from 1 to 9,999:
一 - 1
二 - 2
三 - 3
四 - 4
五 - 5
六 - 6
七 - 7
八 - 8
九 - 9
十 - 10
百 - 100
千 - 1000

In order to count with these, you specifie the amount of 10, 100 or 1,000 you want by adding a number between 1 to 9 before. For instance, 5,678 is 5*1000+6*100+7*10+8 so it becomes 五千六百七十八.

If your number is greater than 9,999, you must split it in groups of 4 digits (123,456,789 -> 1 2345 6789). Then you convert each group and put them next to each other, each group must be followed by an other character telling how high the group is.

万 is the character for 10,000 therefore you convert 1,234,567 into 百二十三万四千五百六十七 ("123"万"4567").

Draw Japanese

You can write anything you want but it is recommended to use Japanese characters since it gives you the order of the strokes and how to draw them.
You can copy paste your Japanese name here in order to learn how to write it.

About Japanese

Japanese is a language mainly composed of 3 alphabets: hiragana (ひらがな), katakana (カタカナ) and kanji (漢字). A common Japanese sentence would contain a mix of these 3 alphabets.

Hiragana and katakana are used for writing sounds since each character from them represent a syllable.

Hiragana can be compared to the small letters' English alphabet, and katakana to the capital letters' one.
Notice how the same word (kaze) looks in either hiragana or in katakana:
かぜ (hiragana)
カゼ (katakana)
In this case, the characters look similar but most of the time they are completely different characters.

Katakana are used for writting foreign words, therefore also foreign names. Meaning that the Japanese characters you get by using this translator are in katakana.

Kanji are characters Japanese took from Chinese. Each of them represents an idea like eating, thinking, bird, ...
These characters are much more complex than Kana.
It is possible to combine them to create new words: let's say you have the kanji for fire (火) and the one for mountain (山), then by puting them together 火山 you just created the word volcano.

Also kanji have around 2 pronounciations each: the Japanese reading called Kun'Yomi (mostly used when a kanji is alone) and the Chinese one called On'Yomi (mostly used for combinations of kanji).

Since you need to know the pronounciation of the kanji, the Japanese young childs can't read many of them so you can find some "subtitles of kanji" (called furigana) written in kana over the kanji in some kid books or videogames.

Learn kana

Kana is a word to talk about both hiragana and katakana.
These two alphabets are composed of the same sounds with different characters for them.

Here is the hiragana one:

And there is the katakana one:

First I would like to say the we and wi kana have been removed from both alphabets and so are no longer used. But it is possible to find them in some old Japanese books (before the 21th century).

Learning all of these may sound kind of long and difficult but it's not that bad once you started.
Kanji are way more frightening since there are thousands of them but again, once you started you begin to understand a sort of a logic behind the characters and keep learning hundreds of kanji faster and faster.

Finally, what you see in these 2 alphabets are not the full list of sounds you can do using kana: there are 2 accents (dakuten and handakuten) who can change the consonnant of the syllable but this doesn't require you to learn anything more.
There are other rules though but you don't need to know them at all for starting learning kana.

Errors

This code is still work in progress for now so if you find any error in it, thank you for reporting it in the comment section.

You can have this website in your browser by clicking here.

Thank you a ton for reading until there!
ありがとうございます！

(｡･ω･｡)

~Japanese basics~ ~日本語の基本~

~Japanese basics~
~日本語の基本~

🇯🇵 JAPANESE BASICS 🇯🇵