Anybody speak Japanese in here?

[aefibird]

Ouch!

[seersin]

okay JEM,I see what your saying so I searched tha net a little I found tha Katakana for tha name Johnny and they say tha pronunciation is Jofunni.Is this right?

[Shorin Ryuu]

Not really. They would most likely pronounce it "Jaw-knee". The characters would be Ja-ni or jani. It really depends how you pronounce "Johnny". I put the dash "-" in there because that's how they extend the sound of a character in katakana.

 

What you put was the literal characters, but they do it based on sound, not the actual roman characters as their katakana/hiragana is syllabic rather than phonetic.

[seersin]

Cool,I appriciate that.I wonder where that site came up with Jofunni.So when writing that Ja-ni,would that be two katakna charcters? Sorry for so many questions but im in tha midst of learning japanese,and these little things are exciting to me

[Shorin Ryuu]

Perhaps the site made the assumption that you already knew how it would be pronounced and you just wanted to know the actual characters.

 

But ja-ni would be 3 characters (or would it be four?), actually...J ya -- Ni

 

The Ja is actually "Ji" combined with a small "ya" to make "Jya". ジャー二

 

edit3: For crying out loud, JEM was right...it's Jyoni- "Jyo ni --"

 

ジョニー

 

I just wasted a bunch of time...

[seersin]

ok ok ok,hold on so It's Jyoni, (gee-ohh-knee)

[Shorin Ryuu]

Yeah. The first character is "Jyo" or simply "Jo", which is a combination of "Ji" and a small "yo". The next character is "ni". The character after that is the long dash.

[seersin]

what is tha long dash for?and is there any certain books you reccomend to help me out,I've been reading Living Languages Japanese course,and Japanese for dummies.Do you have any other suggestions?

[Shorin Ryuu]

In katakana, it's used to extend the vowel sound.

[Kaminari]

Thank you JEM, you've helped a lot. Now, to find the disk!