How do Japanese people know the pronunciation of names in writing?

Japanese Language Reading
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I remember Americans were likewise confused by some of the British names like Hermione.

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And “Philosopher’s Stone”. :stuck_out_tongue:

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For the German version they dropped the “o”, so we call her “Hermine”. That’s one of the only character name changes. Hermione is really hard to pronounce :smiley:

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Harald Töpfer?

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Its a relatively common problem in Japan. This is why forms have a spot for furigana and places like restaurants and such you will write your name in hiragana.

My husbands name is 良蔵 how do you think you pronounce?

よしくら

Japanese people mess it up all the time. Dont worry too much about it. And if people give you a hard time they are rude.

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I’m an ALT and in the classes, on the front of the class desk, is the students seating plan with their names with furigana. The furigana is there to help because teachers don’t know how to read some students names.

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I use a app called Kanji Tree on Android. I got it a few years ago, so no idea if it’s still updating or not, but there is a section under Recognition under Advanced for “Regular Names” and “Obscure Names” that I haven’t touched yet. If you can find it, maybe it’d be helpful for at least ballparking the names when you’re unsure. As most folks have said though, lots of the readings could be anything. It’s like in English with weird names I’ve seen like Aaron, Erin, Aran, and Aron all said the same way.

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I imagine it is a lot like English. How do we know know that the name Hailey could be spelled like: Hailee, Haleigh, Haley, Haylee, Hayleigh, Hayley and Haylie. A non native speaker would not conflate these all to the same exact pronunciation. The subtly is the immersion of the language and our natural ability to adjust to deviations from a norm. Compound all of the previously mentioned with the fact they very well may have had a classmate, friend, family member, or know of a famous person etcetera with the name and you got a solid grounds for associating uncommon kanji names. But, I am sure there are some super uncommon names that scratch the heads of many native speakers.

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