Since this page uses actual text instead of pictures of text, two things need to be in place for the Japanese characters to show: your system has to have a Unicode-compliant font that includes the hiragana and katakana character sets, and your browser has to know how to use that font. Internet Explorer 4.0+ is one such browser.

The font in your system was probably created before VA, VI, VU, VE and VO were added to the Unicode standard. Or to katakana, for that matter. Those sounds may be transliterated as BA, BI, BU, BE and BO. Or, if your font has VU but not VA, VI, VE and VO, you can use VU followed by a small vowel kana to get the other sounds.

There are other ways to encode Japanese that existed prior to Unicode and are still used on many webpages today. Two of those are Shift-JIS and EUC-JP. Problem with those two encodings is that the browser can't always tell it's looking at a different encoding, you have to explicitly tell it to figure out the encoding. Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator can decode EUC-JP and Shift-JIS by selecting, on the View menu, Encoding (Character Set in Navigator) then Japanese EUC-JP or Japanese Shift-JIS. If you don't know which encoding is used, or neither Shift-JIS or EUC-JP worked, you can try Japanese Auto-Detect.

There's an alternative for people who don't have the fonts or don't want to bother with encoding schemes: Shodouka. Shodouka parses a webpage and returns a webpage with all the text replaced by pictures of text. Downside is, the pictures of text take longer to download and then text cut and paste from such a page is not so easy.

There's Arial Unicode MS, which includes every character in the Unicode standard at the time the font was created, but at 23MB, it's big and clunky. Then there's MS Song, MS Hei, Gulim, SimSun, among others. In general, fonts that have the CJK Unified Ideographs also have hiragana and katakana. These fonts usually only have the Latin-1 set and the CJK sets, but lack sets like Latin Extended-A, Cyrillic, Gurmukhi, etc.

Hiragana is used for Japanese words, while katakana is mainly used to transliterate foreign names into Japanese sounds. Katakana is also used for emphasis, for example, in news headlines and in telegrams.

To an extent, yes. There are many subtleties that can affect the way a word is written, and without an understanding of the grammar of the language, one is bound to make mistakes.

For example, my brother thought that 'Pikachu' was written ピカチュ. He did not realize that the drawn out way in which Pikachu says the 'u' sound in his/her own name is reflected in its proper katakana spelling: ピカチュウ.

This reference chart is provided for reference purposes only.

Yes, but be aware that for some sounds you will have to choose an approximation. For instance, the LA, LI, LU, LE and LO sounds are somewhat different from their English versions. In Japanese the L is closer to R, and the sounds are usually transliterated as RA, RI, RU, RE and RO.

There are also problems involving consecutive consonants and final consonants. If the name has different consecutive sounding consonants, these may have to be 'smoothed over' by inserting extra vowels. For example, 'Andrew' would have to become 'Anduru'. Double consonants can sometimes be transliterated with a small tsu ツ that doubles the following consonant sound. A final consonant may either be dropped and replaced with a prolongation of the previous vowel, or an extra final vowel added. 'Peter' could become 'Pitaa'; 'Carol' could become 'Karoru'. These problems are lessened if the first of the consecutive consonants is an N, which has its own kana, or if the final consonant is an N.

So in my case, I transliterate my name, 'Elisabel', to katakana as 'Erisaberu', エリサベル.

You use the numerical character code included in this reference, preceded by an ampersand (&) and a pound sign (#), and followed by a semicolon (;). This constitutes an escape sequence. There are no spaces in the escape sequence.

For example, typing &# 12459 ; in the page's source code, without the spaces, will yield カ in the browser.

The numerical character code must be decimal (base 10). If you get the character code from the Unicode chart, it will be in hexadecimal (base 16) and you will have to convert it to decimal. Most scientific calculators can do this conversion.

It would be a good idea to get a workbook showing you the proper stroke order and direction. Stroke order and direction are very important, especially in katakana, where some characters can be very easily confused with each other. For example, ソ and ン (SO and N). Or シ and ツ (SHI and TSU). And if one is 'printing' rather than writing in calligraphy, stroke direction sometimes becomes the only thing differentiating some characters.

Forgetting line changes is an easier mistake to figure out and to correct. A line change is used to 'change' a kana to a similar sound, for example, タ to ダ (TA to DA). Many kanas have a line change consisting of two short strokes on the upper right of the character, while some kanas have no line change. And then there's the H-syllables, which have two line changes (to B-syllables with two short strokes, and to P-syllables with a circle).

You can e-mail me at [email protected].