japanese phonetics?

Question

can anybody please tell me what the phonetics are for the japanese language. in other words, how to write japanese using any words. like the word table, you would write it as teeburu (te e bu ru) or names like sonc, written as sonikku (so ni kku) if you can give me a website to learn how to do this, that would be great. thanks

the one on wikipedia just reads gives me vowels and syllables, i already know the kana. but what i want to know is how you know how to write table as teeburu. my guess was it was tabaru until someone told me. and sonic is sonikku. how do you find out how to spell the diffrent words so you can write them in japanese. another example is the word promse. i can't write the pr since no such thing exist. please give me a website or something so i can learn how to phonetically write all the diffrent words.

Answer 1

Are you refering to katana and hiragana? You can get a chart on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana

*edit*

I understand what you're after now. Well, I don't think there are any hard and fast rules. Sometimes a word is not what you expect it to be. For example, when I started learning Japanese 10 years ago, I thought "door" would be "doru" but it turned out to be "doa."

I suggest looking at each syllable and seeing which closely fits the Japanese kana. That is how I do it, but again you may end up with something different

Here's a Wikipedia article for starters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcribing_English_to_Japanese

Answer 2

I do not suppose the very first thing you stated is simply too natural... At least I've on no account had / met any person who has a trouble with the ones sounds. However whilst I first began to be taught the language, too many R's in a row bought me quite tongue tied. Like "Taberareru" and such terms. (o_o) I suppose it is difficult adequate that the Japanese means of claiming "R" is elaborate to get correct, however while you must do such a lot of so speedy that simply makes it tougher! I located the right way to make it simpler is (except train) to pronounce it extra like "L" sound.

Answer 3

It simply isn't possible for anyone to come on here and tell you hard and fast rules for this!

To know how to write things in romaji, or katakana, you actually have to know how Japanese people PRONOUNCE the word! Hence the 'door' = 'ドア' thing! (I think that's based on the London & South East England pronunciation BTW!)

For example, why the hell is cabbage pronounced 'kyabettsu'? It's simply not LOGICAL!! To ME, anyway...! I would have thought it should be 'kabeji' or 'kabejji'! But there you are - you simply can't predict these things!
; )

The only way you might find out from a website is this;
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C

I typed in 'cabbage', selected 'exact word match', and got
"キャベツ (n) cabbage
玉菜 【たまな】 (n) cabbage
甘藍 【かんらん】 (n) cabbage"

Tamana and kanran seem to be just alternative names for the basic cabbage 'Brassica oleracea var. capitata'. But in the shops it's normally just called "キャベツ"!! (My Japanese husband has never heard of either name...!) Anyway, as you say you know kana you'll be able to roman-ise words from that if you want!

I typed in 'heart', and got lots of answers, including this one;
"ハート (n) heart;"

Here's another site with a smaller vocabulary;
http://www.yesjapan.com/dictionary/yesjapan200k.php
The good thing about it is that it automatically gives you romaji for all the words.

And here's a site that's down more than it's up;
http://rut.org/cgi-bin/j-e/dict
Again, it gives you romaji - but it hardly ever works!

Answer 4

You just have to listen carefully and realize that not everything has to become katakana-ized (like promise, which is fine as yakusoku).
But there is generally a patten, most of which comes about as just changing "l" sounds to "ru" and just about anything not connected with a vowel (discluding "n") having "u" attached to it.
You don't write by how it's spelled in English, you write by how it's *pronounced*.

It's just something you have to memorize and learn. How did you learn to spell so many English words? English hardly follows much of a phonetic structure, but you were taught and *memorized* how to do it correctly. You just have to do that with Japanese.