Miyano-sama / Japanese Language / Writing character names in Kanji

How to write characters' names in Kanji?

Japanese language is written in three kind of scripts: hiragana, katakana and kanji.

Kanji is what Japanese people call Chinese characters. There are over 4000 Chinese characters out there, that Japanese people learn starting from elementary school until they graduate from university. This means no matter how much you memorize of them, there will be a lot more and more of them to memorize, so you don't have to worry about getting bored after memorizing them all.

These characters aren't very difficult to write and memorize if you learn them separately, and they are really beautiful compared to the English boring letters.

I'm going to present here how to write some characters' names in Detective Conan using Kanji:

Character	Kanji & Strokes
Shinichi 新一
Ran 蘭
Ayumi 歩美
Sonoko 園子
Mouri 毛利
Kogoro 小五郎

Why are there so many Chinese character anyways?

The answer is simply because old Chinese people wasn't trying to represent the sounds of their language into characters, but rather they wanted to the meaning of their words into the characters. In other words, there are Chinese characters as many as Chinese words.

Now that we learnt how to write some of characters' names in Kanji, let's have a look on the meaning of those Kanji's themselves.