How to Search Google in Japanese
Google is an amazing tool that allows us to find information in seconds, and I swear by it. When searching in Japanese, however, Googling can be a bit more complicated. First of all, to find information on an individual in Japanese you obviously need to know the correct kanji for their name, and searching with the wrong characters will bring up unexpected results just as misspelling a name will mess up Google results in English. There are many different name kanji for writing Japanese names, and the most common names can be the hardest to work with since there are so many possible variations. If you wanted to find information on singer Ayumi Hamasaki, for example, you'd type the name in to the kanji front-end processor (IME on Windows, Kotoeri on the Mac) then hit the space bar, scrolling through the many possible kanji. Which one is it? Surprise -- all of them are wrong. The singer writes her first name in hiragana.
Five common ways of writing the female Japanese name Ayumi in kanji.
And there she is!
posted by Peter in Japan at 11:24 PM
6 Comments:
that does seem pretty tricky to do!
11:29 PM
strange i only see four different ways to write ayumi in kanji. but thats just a tiny quibble. i did not know some people only spell their first names in hiragana only.
are there some japanese who only use katagana?
this brings up the artist formerly known (and now currently as well) as prince or that strange symbol... theres no way to type that into google
4:37 AM
This is one bit that amused me in DeathNote. I believe at one point they showed Light (?) trying out several different ways of writing a name before the bad guy buys it.
5:23 AM
Good point! I'll remember that if I ever get one of those. I guess a gaijin would have difficulty using a Death Note against Japanese for that reason ^_^
12:22 PM
Good point! I'll remember that if I ever get one of those. I guess a gaijin would have difficulty using a Death Note against Japanese for that reason ^_^
12:22 PM
Actually, Peter, Google Japan recently implemented a feature that will sometimes allow you to search for Japanese kana or kanji terms in plain old romaji. For details, see the following post:
http://googlejapan.blogspot.com/2009/01/google.html
1:20 AM
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