Yesterday was on a call with bank staff, need to give them my name + email address for further action…and it took me almost half hour because I wasn’t able to find a way that local Japanese can understand.
For example, letter “D”, I said “D for Door”, they cannot understand; OK I tried “D for Dog”, they also couldn’t understand; After a few more rounds they finally understood “D for December”.
When it came to “L” “R” it’s even worse, I think people in the restaurant might feel weird because I looked like practicing English over the phone…..
18 comments
Always use country / famous city names to spell. Works for me everytime. Though my name doesn’t contain uncommon characters like ‘Q’ ‘X’ which might be foreign to Japanese.
L for London and R for Russia always works.
For “D” it’s easy…. “A B C D の D”. But this doesn’t scale well….
It’s pretty common to have have to exchange email addresses over the phone. When in doubt, I over-dramaize the katakana pronunciation. It feels cartoonish and unnecessary but you have to match their romaji. Not “zee” for Z, it’s “zed”.
I feel you – my first name is Hilary ༎ຶ‿༎ຶ
For restaurants be Mr Tanaka.
So use a Japanese word where possible! D for Daikon.
When I go home next time I’ll change my last name… Not kidding. It was hard in my own country. But here… They even managed to split it in two parts!
Totally!
Here’s a link to a list from a Japanese website, which should help!
https://lab.pasona.co.jp/trade/word/311/
Shit, does the NATO Phonetic Alphabet work here? I don’t know.
i.e. A for Alpha, … D for Delta, etc.
For L and R, you have to really pronounce them the katakana way to get the message across
Otherwise I try to pick nouns that are more obvious for Japanese speakers
like if I was to say ‘D’ I would say ドイツのD (D as in ‘Doitsu’)
For Q, they say Q&A in Katakana so that one should be okay to get across too
For l and r, couldn’t you just use エル for L and アール for R? Seems to have worked for me before when I’m trying to tell someone how to spell something.
D for Doraemon
Use the alphabet, say the few characters before and emphasize yours.
For example when you want to say “D” you say: ABC… D!
You can’t say “Dee” you must say “Day” that’s how they learn it.
Do you pronounce the English letters in English or in katakana? I highly recommend to pronounce in katakana and to use country names / easy words as reference;
M-A-R-Y:
メキシコのエム・
アメリカのエー・
ロシアのアル・
イエローのワイ・
You could’ve said D for:
Don quixote
Donmai
Daiso
Daimaru
Danboru
Loads of words you could use. I’d use **Donmai** just to stealthily express my annoyance at the time though.
Look up how to say the letters in Katakana. Most people won’t be able to understand “V” if it’s not pronounced “ブイ”
Imagine going through the entire school system and not know the alphabet. Just ask for another staff member at that point.