Important Note: If you are here to look at a Kanji character for a tattoo, I would remind you to be smart and double check the characters I have here. I have many links on the links page to places where you can either look up or ask about Japanese characters. I'm not trying to patronize, but this is a foreign language and I would not recommend tattooing a foreign language on yourself unless you understand exactly what it means. For a good example, I tell people the story I read about a girl who wanted her Chinese Year sign as a tattoo. Her year was Rooster so she got the character for "chicken" tattooed. What she didn't know was that in China, "chicken" is slang for "prostitute." So be smart people, please.
Important Notes on Pronunciation and Spelling
If you want to be able to read Japanese correctly, here are the rules you need to know.
Vowels
Japanese vowels are generally shorter than western vowels. Resist the urge to hold a single vowel, to make the vowel long or to turn it into a dipthong. Where a vowel is meant to be held longer it will either be repeated, or it will have a mark above it. The two marks most often used are a circumflex ( ^ ) or a straight line over the vowel to be extended (which I am using on these pages thanks to the magic of Unicode). When writing in Hiragana or Katakana, a vowel is extended one of two ways. Either the character for the individual vowel is written after the vowel to be extended (thus repeating it), or a straight line, called a "chō-on kigō" or simply "bō", is written after the vowel (see the Hiragana and Katakana sections for visuals).
Extending a vowel in such a manner does not make it a dipthong. The sound is the same, it is just held longer. Generally, the only dipthongs you will find in Japanese are "ai" and "ei". Any other vowels next to each other in a word are pronounced separately. Example: "aoi" which means "blue" is a word made entirely of vowels. It is pronouned with each vowel separated, "ah-oh-ee", instead of "owie" (of course, in the speed of conversation anything can become a dipthong, even if it shouldn't be).
Here is the best approximation of the vowel sounds I can come up with.
-A = "ah" as in father, never "aa" as in apple.
-E = "eh" almost like bed but a bit longer, more like the word "meh" which a lot of my friends use to mean "whatever".
-I = "ee" as in need, never "ih" as in bit or "ai" as in kite.
-O = "oh". This one is tough. It's not nearly as long as the "oh" in zone which is really an almost-dipthong. But it's also not quite as short the "aw" sound in octagon. It's right inbetween the two. Take the longer O and then open your mouth a bit wider.
-U = "oo" as in food, never "yu" as in use, there's another letter for that sound.
Consonants
Most Japanese consonants are just like ours with a few notable rules and exceptions. Most important rule to note: No consonant in Japanese can be alone, without a vowel following it, except for the consonant N. All other consonants must have a vowel after them, period.
-S is distinct from Z. It is always like s in snake.
-Ch is always as in church.
-Ts in "tsu" is one consonant, one sound. This is sometimes a tough one for westerners because we have nothing like it as a single consonant. Take any western word that ends in "ts" and erase whatever comes before that "ts". Practice with that sound a bit. The T, like all other consonants but N, will never be by itself. "Tsu" is always "tsu", no more, no less, so if you have a word like "jitsu", "ji" is one syllable, "tsu" is another, always.
-H is as in hat.
-F is another tough one. There is only one place F occurs naturally in Japanese and that is combined with the vowel U. The letter "fu" is part of the H group because it is pronounced half F and half H. The effect is somewhat like when we say "phew!" after an effort. It's like a puff of air, F-like, but not very strong. Leave a larger distance between your teeth and your lip than for a western F and remember that the U is as in food.
-R is the really fun one. There is no distinction between R and L, they are the same sound, though some Japanese lean the sound more one way than the other, like an accent. This sound is similar to the rolled Spanish R where your tongue taps the roof of your mouth right behind your front teeth. It should do that here as well. The effect of this is actually sort of a soft D sound. The best way to get this one down is to listen to it being said over and over and mimic it. If you're going to err, err on the side of R.
-N comes in two forms. There's the N row (na, ni, nu, ne, no), and there's also the single N, the only consonant that can be without a vowel. Just like the regular consonant-vowel letters, it is a single syllable. Therefore, a word like "sensei" is actually four syllables: se-n-se-i. Another thing to know about the single N is that if it comes right before an H, B, or P, it is pronounced as an M, though still written as N. For example, the word "senpai" is pronounced "sempai".
-G is always as in good, never as in gin. That's what J is for.
-Dzu is the voiced counterpart to "tsu". Instead of T+S, it's D+Z, one consonant, one sound. It's usually romanjied as "zu" and that can be confusing since there is also a "zu" in the Z row. Dzu however is not used very often. I'm still trying to find all the occurances so I can note them. Follows the same rule as "tsu", always intact as "dzu."
-J exists naturally in only two places. Both are spelled "ji" with the J being pronounced as in jeep. The two "ji"s are (perhaps oddly, perhaps predictably) in the Z and D rows. Traditional Japanese has no such sounds as "zi" (zee) and "di" (dee). Recently, the sound "di" has added because of its common use in western languages but it doesn't quite sound the same as ours. Anyway, both "zi" and "di" are pronounced "ji". Again, how do you tell the difference? If written in Hiragana or Katakana, easy. If not, you really can't.
Like vowels, consonants can also be held longer. In writing, the consonant is just repeated as in Nikko. When writing in either Hiragana or Katakana, a small letter "tsu" is placed before the consonant to be extended.
Note on Spelling/Pronunciation Changes
As you look at the list, you may notice some odd spelling and pronunciation changes within the words. For example, the word for hundred, "hyaku", changes to "byaku" when combined with the word for the number 3 and to "pyaku" when combined with the word for the number 8. What's with that? Well, to the Japanese, this type of change has to do with the particular sounds being combined together. It "sounds wrong" to the Japanese to combine the H in "hyaku" with certain other sounds, so they change it.
But why do they change it to B or P? It has to do with sound groups which are based on voiced versus non-voiced consonants. A voiced consonant is one which makes your voicebox vibrate when you say it. A non-voiced consonant, obviously, doesn't. The Hiragana and Katakana alphabets are set up to separate the voiced from non-voiced consonants. The non-voiced consonants are in the basic set: K, S, T, H. Their voiced counterparts, G, Z, D, B, and P, are in the second set of letters. If you look at either alphabet, the characters for the voiced set look exactly like the characters for the non-voiced set with only a small difference. The voiced ones have diacritical marks, either two small marks (called "daku-ten") or a circle ("handaku-ten"). G, Z, D, and B all have "daku-ten", which look sort of like closing quotation marks. P has the "handaku-ten", the circle. These marks are always located on the right side of the character. These marks tell you it's the voiced consonant rather than the basic, non-voiced consonant.
Changes in Japanese words that happen because of this "conflict of combined sounds" will always follow the same pattern. The non-voiced consonant will change to it's voiced counterpart(s). Never will a voiced consonant change backwards to the non-voiced, nor will a non-voiced change to another consonant other than its counterpart(s). So here is the quick guide:
K --> G
S --> Z
T --> D
H --> B, P
Once I learn more about Japanese, I'll add to this a guide to what particular sounds cause these changes.
One last note, I promise!
Know that there is a difference between a word like "riyu" and the letter "ryu". The former is two separate syllables - ree-yoo - whereas the latter is one syllable. It can take a bit of practice to say it as one syllable. A good example, Tokyo is pronounced "toh-kyo" and not "toh-kee-yoh", which is an Americanization of the name.
Background made by me, Nikko no Daitenshi, using Photoshop 7.0. The characters linked to on this page were created with Windows XP's Japanese Language Support. Please link back to me if you use any of them.
If you believe an image on here belongs to you and is not credited, please inform me.
