How do I write sounds that don't exist in Japanese?


Yesterday I was practising katakana by writing my classmates' names down, but
some of the names were harder than I expected. I have a classmate named Väinö,
but neither the ä or ö sounds exists in Japanese. At first I considered
writing his name down as Waino, but that sounds like the word vaino which
means persecution in my native tongue. How should I write these vowels?

Has anyone had similar problems? How did you solve them?




unfortunately, Japanese is not well suited for representing the sounds of
words or names in other languages. Listening to that name online (assuming it
is the Finnish name that I found the pronunciation for) the closest katakana
would be ヴァーイネ which in romaji would be written Vaaine or Va-ine. Some people
might choose to write the katakana 'ne' (ネ) half-size, which in Japanese
represents that the sound should be minimized in some way. There are standard
and well understood versions of this like ファ、フェ、so you might get Japanese to a
closer approximation of your friend's name with 'Vaainue' where the katakana
'nue' is written ヌェ. Or go the other way and write it 'Vaaineu' with a
minimized 'u' sound.

Japanese people know that katakana cannot accurately represent the sound of
other languages well, so most of them will take care to listen to how your
friend pronounces his name, and try to mimic him. But for people seeing his
name in print and never hearing the proper pronunciation, expect to have to
help them get it right upon meeting them.

