hi i have started to learn Katakana and i see that there arent any L sounds. when I’m trying to write English words in katakana what letters that are in the jp katakana ‘alphabet’ can be substituted
I think that L–> R or something like that but I would like some more guidance.
sorry if this is kind of vague I cant think of a way to articulate it .
(edit. thanks dor all of the lovely replies. looking back on my post now I think that It is kind of dumb because of corse words in jp have their own pronunciation, so just to clarify I was taking abt names lol sorry)
Yeah, you use R instead. Though please also note that when you transliterate into katakana, you go by pronunciation rather than by spelling. For example, “half” contains an L, but it’s pronounced more like “harf”, so the katakana version of the word is ハーフ.
Only tangentially related, and maybe you understood this already, but keep in mind that if you want to use borrowed English words in a sentence in Japanese, you have to rely on the existing Japanese conversion into katakana. That is, the word that exists in the dictionary already. You can’t try to invent your own.
If by English words you meant human names or titles of things that one wouldn’t already expect to be in Japanese, then that would be different.
Yes that’s true, but I wouldn’t say spelling doesn’t matter, at least the katakana spelling on the output end. There are generally-accepted ways to write common words in katakana, so if you’re just going by sound and winging it, you could end up spelling it “wrong” (or at least weird)
…though even for names you can often find them in the ENAMDICT dictionary (jisho.org and other places have this data). For instance if you know Peter Jackson is ピータージャクソン, Peter Pan is ピーターパン and Peter Falk is ピーターフォーク, then you can be pretty sure that the usual way to write the first name “Peter” is ピーター and you should stick to that. ENAMDICT also has a lot of placenames.
But still, if you happen to say your “Peter” differently than they do (as in, your name is Peter and it’s not pronounced like Peter Jackson’s Peter) then you’d still be at liberty to come up with a different katakana spelling that reflects that.
I’d second this with a practical example:
My name - Cezar - in Romanian sounds hella different than the English pronounciation. The “official” Japanese katakana is シーザー presumably based on the English pronounciation of the original Latin name ‘Caesar’ and frankly it sounds awfully weird (funny enough, it’s very similar to how the name would be read by a Hindi speaker).
Say this version to a Romanian who doesn’t know Japanese and they’d have no idea what you mean
I get that in English it is what it is, but Japanese does have the katakana チェ and then チェザー or maybe チェーザー sound much, much closer to the Romanian version of the name (it’s practically just losing the trailing R but otherwise all good).
Not that I’d ever be in a position to have my name written in Japanese or spoken by a Japanese person, but if that did happen and there is indeed some leeway then I’d insist on this version being used instead of the official loanword
