Katakana and Japanese Words Borrowed from Other Languages

Can you figure out what this means? It's actually not as hard as you might think, the first word here is the same in both English and Japanese, although with a slightly different pronunciation. But, in order to read this you must know Katakana and trust me when you are in Tokyo you are going to want to know what this means.

Katakana is one of the three Japanese writing systems. Two of these are phonetic alphabets collectively called the "kana." Katakana is one, Hiragana is the other. Katakana and Hiragana are really mirror images of each other kind of like upper and lower case letters in english. Each symbol either represents a vowel sound or a consonant then a vowel sound. For example アrepresents "a" and ホ represents "ho" in Katakana. The pronunciations of the vowels and consonants are the same as in Spanish I'm told. (I know I'm dropping a lot of knowledge right now but bear with me here).

The major difference in usage between Katakana and Hiragana is that Katakana is used to represent words "borrowed" from other languages. One of the things that really surprised me about learning Japanese was just how many of and how common these borrowed words are. Essentially they take the word from the other language and try to stay as close to the original as possible but using the Japanese alphabet. Of course because the Japanese alphabet is missing a lot of the phonetic sounds used in english the words become a bit different - lacking L for instance.

To native english speakers a lot of these words can sound like odd mispronunciations of words we know. For instance

Beer - ビ－ル (biiru)

Tequila - テキ－ラ(tekiira)

Bread パン (pan - from portuguese)

oh and

Sexual Harassment -セカル ハラセメント(sekaru harasemento) learned that one during my new employee initiation.

To see the full alphabet head on over to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana

Now back to the sign, the first four characters are in Katakana, the last character is from the third Japanese writing system called "Kanji" which are essentially chinese characters which represent ideas rather then phonetics.

The first for characters are カ "ka", ラ"ra", オ"o", and ケ"ke", oh yea that's right KARAOKE!

The last kanji symbol stands for "building" or "mansion" so this can be read as "karaoke mansion." Which as far as I can tell is a chain karaoke spot around Tokyo, I've seen a few of these place all around the city. I haven't had the opportunity to check one out yet but it's very, very high on my to do list.

One other thing Katakana is used for is foreign names. I had to get business cards with my contact info in both Japanese and English, this led to a rather large debate among my team at work about how exactly to Japanesize my name. The big debate was over the start of "Hoover" the "oo" is most closely associated with the "u" sound in japanese but japanese doesn't use "hu" the choice was between "fu" and "ho". We went back and forth a bit trying both out loud and eventually settled on

マシュ－ フ－バ－ (Mashuu Fuubaa)

So that's my Japanese name and I've got 100 business cards with it.