The Old School Otaku Lounge

This is a strange question, but it's been bugging me -- how do you tell people the spelling of words in hiragana and katakana? For example, I use ダン for my first name in Japanese; if someone asked me for the spelling (what would that question be, anyways?), what would I say? In English I would say each letter, as in "d", "a", "n", "i", "e", "l", but how do you spell things out character by character in hiragana and katakana?

I'll give it a shot. I am pretty sure this is how it goes. I'll write it in katakana for you.

エイ　ビー　スィー　ディ　イー　エッフ　ジー　エイチ　アイ　ジェイ　ケイ　エル　エム　エン　オー　ピー　キュー　アール　エス　ティー　ユー　ヴィー　ダッブルユ　エックス　ワイ　ズィー

I conulted a Japanese coworker on this. However, for Z, it seems that most kids think that it's the British pronunciation, or ゼット. The archaic form for C would be シー and V would be ブイー, but the Japanese education system is slowly trying to introduce proper phonics. Phonics has been ignored for all these years, and finally they want to try to do something about it. I try to introduce it as much as I can to my schools.

Ah, my apologies, I was quite unclear. Let me try again...


Let's say I'm in the USA, making a hotel reservation over the phone. I give my name as "Daniel." The person on the other end of the phone asks me to spell that out for them. I say "d", "a", "n", "i", "e", "l".


Let's say I'm in Japan, making a hotel reservation over the phone. I give my name as "ダン." The person on the other end of the phone asks me to spell that out for them. I say ... ?

Oh. In that case, for Daniel, just say "da, n, i, e, ru." Greg becomes グレッグ in Japanese, so I would say "gu, re, chiisai tsu, gu."

There are no different names for kana, other than the sounds they make. That must be why the kids think it's funny when I start making goofy sounds when teaching phonics like "a, ei, ah, buh, kkh, duh, eh, ee, ff," etc. Well how else do you learn how to read English? It's not surprising that people here can only recognize words when reading them, but can't actually pronounce them.

Ah, I see. Thank you!