[MoIA/MoE] Transcribing your name into Japanese Writing

Day 2,258, 12:11 • Published in Japan Japan • by William of Edenbury


This article is related to the Japanese language articles, but isn't so much a lesson. I realized a bit ago that since everyone was exposed to Katakana in the first lesson, you are able to transcribe your name into those characters.





As you might remember from Lesson 1, Katakana are the Japanese characters used for foreign loanwords. This means that in order to transcribe our names, we use Katakana rather than Hiragana.

The biggest change in your name that you will notice is a likely elongation. This is because Japanese pronunciation does not allow consonant clusters at the beginning of a syllable and ends up with more vowels. Another change will be for any of you with the letter "L" in your name. There is really no distinction between the "R" and "L" sounds so your name will include a Japanese "R" sound which is quite a bit different from English "R" sounds.

Ok enough technical babble, lets get to transcribing some names. I call dibs on the first transcription 😛



First comes the Latin lettering of the name, then the Katakana transcription, then my attempt to help you pronounce it.

1) William ---- ウィリアム ---- (We-Ree-A-Mu)

2) Masaharu ---- マサハル ---- (Ma-Sa-Ha-Ru)

3) Aryzn ---- アリジン ---- (A-Ree-Gee-N)

4) Squibeel ---- スキビル ---- (Skee-Bee-ru)

5) Nicolas ---- ニコラス ---- (Knee-Co-Ra-Su)


*Pronunciation note: When characters such as Ru, Mu, Su, ku, etc. come at the end of a name, you are supposed to leave the "U" part of the sounds silent. I just left it in my pronunciations so you could see what part I was talking about.


(Yes the images are random, but I like them 😁


One Last thing. Now that you know you can write your name in Katakana, you can combine it with your Family name from the RP project. Just remember that Japanese name order puts your family name before your personal name.

So my official, fully transcribed name would be:

秀吉 ウィリアム ---- Hideyoshi William

(Hideyoshi is my in-game family 😃)

And that's all for now folks. For many names, you can go to google and look for your name in Japanese (make sure to look for the katakana version). For those of you with unusual game-only names, you can ask us to assist you in transcribing your name.


~秀吉 ウィリアム
Minister of Internal Affairs
Minister of Education