Talk:Junta Nakao/@comment-5534769-20140726211548/@comment-397235-20140730002739

Well I'll tell you.

Way back in the 1980's when I was your age (sarcasm; I wasn't born in the 80's), I took Japanese my Sophomore year of high school. I enjoyed the class first term so much I royally screwed myself over the next term by signing up for the second class (well, that and there were some really cute girls in the class...). In Japanese II, among other things, we learned some basic Kanji, to go along with the kana (Hiragana which is the older of the two, and Katakana which is used predominately for movie posters and foreign words) we'd learned the previous term.

There are somewhere around five hundred Kanji out there, which more often than not represent the same sounds but mean different things. The problem I was running into with Takako's name is her parents apparently decided to pick an obscure combination for her given name, one which I couldn't find anywhere online to get an exact meaning. While the idea is really interesting, in practice it's a massive pain.

I ran into the same problem with my own name, which is a Galicized (Irish) version of the French surname Rennault. It doesn't help any my name has several sounds not found in Japanese (St and l for instance), which made finding Kanji for my name especially difficult (this was a project toward the end of the year). My name is already absurdly long (a friend of mine, who was really gifted at Japanese, was complaining about how hard it was to "Kanjify" her monosyllabic given, middle, and surname; I told her to shut up because my last name had more syllables (and therefore more characters) than her full name).

It's especially irritating because in order for it to match my name also had to contain the sound "Ra" (pronounced raw) twice, and there are only two Kanji for Ra, which mean either "silk" or "naked." And our names had to make sense (all Japanese names do this: Yuuya Mochizuki is "Full Moon of 100 Nights" while Takako Sugiura is "Noble Child of the Cedar Field"). A friend of mine's came out as "After Dance Put On Pants" which was at least amusing. I don't remember mine, other than I had to cheat a lot to get something which even sort of made sense. It wasn't a fun project, given I was trying to use a language from an island nation in the Pacific to write the name of someone whose ancestors came from the North Atlantic. Geography doesn't exactly help matters there.