Usage notes Enter a katakana word in the box below. Japanese: Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji. Home | About Me | Contact Me | Resources | Site Policies. For long vowels, instead of adding a second vowel as in hiragana, katakana usually uses a short line (ー) to represent the second vowel. Press the button to find similar English words in the dictionary. And then there are the names that are so bizarre to begin with that any romanization would have to be either extremely liberal in order to make sense, or end up nonsensical either way. These basic kana are in turn modified by the "dakuten" (゙ ), which resembles a quotation mark and transforms a voiceless kana such as "ka" into a voiced "ga" and changes the soft "f-" series into the "b-" series; and the "handakuten" (゚ ), which resembles a degree sign and modifies the soft "f-" series of kana into the hard "p-" series. Installation. To convert romaji to kana, see this page . This page was last modified on 23 April 2020, at 15:04. Romaji.Me English to romanized Japanese, japanese to Romaji translation Free Online English to Japanese translation tool and Romaji transliteration tool for Japanese text (Kanji, Hiragana kana and Katakana). I will not add the horizontal bar on top of the first vowel unless necessary. Any writing system is, at best, an approximation of the sounds it represents. Thus, the Japanese name for the overall brand is literally "Transformer" (トランスフォーマー Toransufōmā). This wiki notes such ambiguities if they are considered significant. Single kanji can also be compounded into more complex concepts; for example, the Japanese word for telephone, "Denwa" is made up of the symbols "電話", which separately mean "electric" and "talk". The pronunciation of each katakana character is exactly the same as the equivalent hiragana character. second kana column is based on pronunciation only. 6 Word of advice. While Japanese does have official romanization systems, such as the Nihon-shiki, it can still be difficult to romanize a Japanese word to match its author's intent due to the sharing of phonemes and other artifacts of the differences between the English and Japanese languages. Press "Convert to katakana" to Due to the influence of the Chinese language, Japanese also uses "Kanji", logographic symbols that represent specific concepts. I want to try and employ a more "intelligent" converter (note that the end result will be a default, the user will be able to tweak the transliteration if they so choose) As an example, have this name of a character from … For example, the correct way for Japan capital in romaji is Tōkyō, but we always write it as Tokyo. Any writing system is, at best, an approximation of the sounds it represents. So you just promised yourself you are going to learn Japanese as a challenge and then you find out that you not only have to learn two phonetic alphabets but eventually a system of no less then a few thousand of originally … This doesn't always apply, however; some English-derived names with a plural in it may in fact keep the "s"-suffix in their katakana spelling, such as Generations (ジェネレーションズ Jenerēshonzu), resulting in an inconsistent appearance in the combination "Transformers: Generations", where "Generations" uses the plural-"s" but "Transformers" doesn't. The modern Japanese writing system distinguishes between fewer phonemes than most, but this does not mean the language lacks those phonemes, merely that different sounds can be represented by the same symbols. This English-to-katakana converter is based on these rules for conversion. Sometimes an official romanization may even be deliberately chosen to be distinct from the "obvious" one: The Japanese Robotmasters and Binaltech toys of the Generation 1 Mirage character, whose Japanese name (リジェ Rije) references the original toy's vehicle mode (a Ligier racing car), had their names officially romanized as "Rijie". The All Rights Reserved. Foreign words rendered "down" into the Japanese script and then re-Romanized frequently acquire creative spellings as a result, with such hilarious results as "Thanks for Fisiting Us" instead of "Thanks for Visiting Us". That means I will receive a small commission if you decide to make a purchase through those links, at no additional cost to you. Type English words in the box below. For full phrases, this is further compounded by the disparate grammatical structure of Japanese which, unlike English, has a separate word order, frequently omits subjects, and lacks articles. identical, the second column is omitted. 1 Introduction. not be found in the dictionary, and so the katakana was guessed based The most well-known examples are Deathsaurus (デスザラス Desuzarasu; an unreleased Hasbro Robot Heroes figure of the character would have been named "Dessaras") and "Latolata" (ラートラータ Rātorāta), although the Japanese names of Generation 1 Kup (チャー Chā, also "Char", officially even rendered as "Chear" once) and Springer (スプラング Supurangu; either "Sprung" or "Sprang") and Vortex (ボルター Borutā, either "Vorter" or "Volter") are similarly wacky. In fairness, we mangled the name of their entire country. Similar to the hiragana chart, the katakana chart below shows the 46 basic characters together with their romaji. Romanization difficulties with regards to Transformers, And it's happened back-to-front in Transformers, now, https://tfwiki.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=Romanization&oldid=1405245. Kana is a primarily syllabic script; with the exception of six kana, each symbol represents a consonant-vowel pair, such as ど do, は ha, ぐ gu, and け ke. Technically, the English-specific term would be "Anglicization". 2 Hiragana. The situation isn't helped at all by the fact that, often, the English characters are used merely for an aesthetic purpose or to appear "exotic", making literal accuracy a low priority. Your input looks like it might be romanized Japanese 「default」. Copyright © 2010-2020 by Kia Leng Koh,  Learn-Japanese-Adventure.com. For example, pet is represented in katakana as ペット (petto). Below shows the additional katakana chart of 拗音 (youon) with 濁点 (dakuten) and 半濁点 (handakuten). See some examples below.. 3 Katakana. Similar to hiragana, when a small tsu (ッ) called 促音 (sokuon) is added, it means the following consonant is geminated or doubled. The first kana column is based on pronunciation and spelling. The proper romanization of Japanese character names can sometimes be unclear. Similarly, the additional katakana chart below shows those with 濁音 (dakuon) and 半濁音 (handakuon). It's likely that you may get confused with the hiragana characters when learning the katakana characters. Actual Japanese people can often have their names romanized in several ways, all of which are, by default, equally valid: For example, Kōjin Ōno (大野 光仁 Ōno Kōjin) can also be romanized as "Kojin Ohno" or "Kouzin Ono". Its equivalent in hiragana is つ (tsu). One problem is posed by the Japanese use of the plural, which doesn't use an "s"-suffix like it does in English. When these are Unfortunately, this can lead to ambiguity as to which sound is truly intended, often resulting in a phenomenon called "Engrish", when a translator not familiar enough with English under- or over-romanizes a Japanese word (usually based on a foreign word to begin with) into English or another Western language. Romanization refers to the adaptation of languages or words that do not use Latin letters to the 26-character Latin alphabet used in English (among other, less important languages). The proper romanization of Japanese character names can sometimes be unclear. convert them into katakana. FAQ Page: What are sokuon and long vowels? 4 Kanji. English has more than twenty-six sounds denoted by character-combinations (ex. Kana can be written using two native alphabets: the "hiragana" script used primarily for Japanese words, and the "katakana" script used primarily for loanwords or foreign words. In romaji, this is represented by doubling the consonant that follows the small tsu. Since the vast majority of Transformers names used for the Japanese market are English or English-derived, romanizing them isn't particularly difficult— for example, Megatron's Japanese name (メガトロン Megatoron) is simply a transliteration of his Western name; the same applies to Thundercracker (サンダークラッカー Sandākurakkā). However, since Takara uses the spelling "Transformers" every time the name is rendered in English, the plural-"s" can be assumed to materialize in the transition from katakana to the Latin spelling in much the same way Optimus Prime's trailer appears and disappears every time he transforms. It will also help your brain to detect the pattern of Japanese sentence. Please add the following Maven dependency to your pom.xml: com.andree-surya moji4j 1.0.0 Romaji and Kana Conversion However, it is usually omitted nowadays. Basic Katakana Chart and Additionals. Contents hide. However, katakana have more additional readings because they are used to read foreign words. To convert romaji to kana, see this page. Moji4J is an open source Java library to converts between Japanese Hiragana, Katakana, and Romaji scripts. The pronunciation is the same as in hiragana, after the first consonant is pronounced, pause for the amount time to pronounce the consonant, then continue to pronounce the following consonant. However, katakana have more additional readings because they are used to read foreign words. Similar to the hiragana chart, the katakana chart below shows the 46 basic characters together with their romaji. Adding smaller version of ya, yu or yo (ャ, ュ, or ョ) to katakana ending in vowel i form the additional katakana chart below. To approximate these sounds, Japanese generally uses phonemes from the "r-", "h-", and "b-" series of kana. This wiki notes such ambiguities if they are considered significant. Introduction. Don't worry, take your time to memorize the 46 basic characters and then continue with the 拗音 (youon). What are Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji & Romaji? It is the eighteenth syllable in the gojūon order; its position is タ行ウ段 (ta-gyō u-dan, “ row ta, section u ”). Things to note • In Katakana, ー means that you need to hold … And it's happened back-to-front in Transformers, now.