An Unsui will come along any minute now.
Gassho
Gassho
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Hello Risho,
let me generalise briefly in order not to lose myself in too many details. The really complicated characters you see in Japanese script ( these and only these characters are called Kanji) are actually Chinese characters that were adopted by the Japanese quite some time ago due to them not having developed their own writing system at the time. Over time, two simplified syllable alphabets emerged that are slightly longer than our alphabet and that complement the Kanji...they are called Hiragana and Katakana.
Now Katakana is used whenever a foreign word gets shoehorned into Japanese using the Japanese syllables and vowels which are closest to for example the English words in terms of sound ( in many cases English native speakers won't be able to recognize the original word)
. Hiragana is used for prepositions and loads of grammatical "situations" where it shows that the Japanese language can't easily rely on Kanji only, due the Chinese and Japanese language not being related at all.
Usually you'll come across all three at the same time when seeing/reading Japanese texts.
Spelling phonetically is always going to be a bit of a "let's try to minimise the linguistic collateral damage as best as we can" kinda affair. So a name like Robert would be cut into syllable pieces that would combine ro-baa-to
Please keep in mind that the Japanses Katakana pronounciation is referring to the way in which most western European languages spell. So the english sound "eeee" would use the Katakana "iiiiii" vowel. The English "A" would be turned into "ei"....I made a less than perfect video related to this topic a while ago:
Hope this helps.
Gassho,
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