Japanese names

I know how to write my name, Mark, in Japanese (maku) - but how do you write Retro in Japanese?

I'm sure other forum members would like assistance with writing their name in Japanese, and will post here ;-)

I'll point out you can find your name in Japanese on sites such as this and this

 

Actually, a better way of romanising that would be 'Maaku' or 'Māku', or 「マーク」 if you want to do it properly ^_^

Retro would be 「レトロ」('retoro'), methinks...

Mine's 「アロン」or 'aron'... not really much different from Aaron, really...

 

Do you pronounce your name like "A(hh)" or "(h)ey"? I'd prolly do "Ei-rin" or "Ei-ron" ( エィリン , エィロン ) still since アロン is funky. I guess エィリン is too much like Erin.

 

Yes, Mark is indeed マーク (that's my name too) and Zilog Jones is right about the Retro spelling (レトロ）.

Yakumo

 

Cool! Thanks guys

 

I pronounce the "aa" like ア. I hate it when people pronounce it the other way, though a lot of people too - most Aarons I've known pronounce the "aa" like "aa" though. I thought at first アーロン might be more correct, until after Googling it seemed to be mainly used for "Auron" ^_^

By the way, my actual Japanese sucks to the max. All I can do is gairaigo. Great for playing games, though!

 

augusto ? whats the translation ? augusuto?

 

アガスト
a-ga-su-to

 

I think アーガスト

 

I have a quick question. In the name Mark, why would you have a dash between it:

"Ma" - "Ku"
(Sorry, I don't know how to insert Katakana symbols here)

 

My name is also Mark so here we go The Japanese have no single "R" sound or single "L" sound so if you extend the "a" after "m" in Mark it sounds a little like an "r" This is why Japanese use this bar. It just means that the sound of the letter before it is extended.

MA = マ　
KU = ク

If you just write マク (Maku) it sounds like Mac not Mark.

Yakumo

 

Hi, folks. If you want to put your name into katakana, but don't know how to do it yourself, or don't trust a translation site, my recommendation is to try Googling for someone famous matching your name, and setting the preferences to "Japanese Pages Only".

For example, you're searching for Aaron; why not try "Hank Aaron" (http://www.google.com/search?as_q=&...s_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&safe=images) and check what the pages say.

There you go. ハンク・アーロン.

 

What about Rafael ?

How it's written / pronouced in japanese?

 

Easy

ラファエル (RA Fa E RU)
RA as in Rabbit
FA as in Fan (not as in the American hard A accent though)
E as in Egg
RU as in Rule

The "Fa" is a combination of "FU" and a small "A" which makes "FA" Japanese is really crazy like that since they only have 48 or so original sounds so they combine them to make new ones. Bloody crazy when you first start.

Yakumo

 

Are there supposed to be question marks everywhere?

 

You most likely don't have support for Japanese and other languages installed on your system; depending on your OS you can either download a Japanese/Chinese/Korean language pack (on pre-2000 versions of Windows) or going to the Regional And Language Settings applet in Control Panel and from there going to the Languages tab and finally ticking the box that says, "Install Support For East Asian Languages." This is the method on XP, and I BELIEVE Win2k as well, though I'm not entirely sure.

And the the beautiful thing about the Japanese language is its limitation of sounds - each vowel only has one sound compared to English's ridiculous alphabet soup where you can make any vowel sound like any other one with a little work. This makes transcribing your name into katakana relatively easy once you know the characters.

Also, for everyone who wants to put their name into katakana: Remember that this part of the Japanese language is primarily used to express foreign loan words not present in traditional Japanese. While most words - computer (コンピューター） for example - are fairly inflexible in their translation, names are not, as they're essentially a phoenetic translation of the pronunciation into Japanese. So while there's no harm in taking the 'traditional' katakana-ization of your name, if it has a different pronunciation feel free to experiment in getting the sound closest to your native language. In Zilog Jones' case, while アーロン does indeed sound like Auron, if your name is pronounced like that then it's not really a problem. With the limited set of sounds in Japanese, you'll run into names sounding alike from time to time.

 

That and your name might also mean something in Japanese!

 

Hmmm..I was on another computer earlier, and now I can see the language.