Originally Posted by: PonyOneKa-ri-su. "Karisu." Quite often, especially with younger people, you could omit the "u" at the end, because while there's no "-s" in Japanese, they're taught English from a very early age now, and though most of Japan is still pretty dismal when it comes to actually speaking it, you could probably get away with "Karis," (pronounced "ka-rees") in most major urban areas. Some people would be able to understand it as "K'rees" in terms of pronounciation, but... yes. There's no hard "ch" like you'd find in "chris," how ever there are some "ch" sounds in Japanese, like "chuugoku" which is Japanese for "Chinese."

Japanese is based around the syllables A, I, U, E, O; pronounced respectively "ah," (as in "awesome) "ee" (as in "eek"), oo (as in "uber"), "eh" (as in "egg") and "oh" (as in "over"). From there, you have a total of 47 syllables that form the entire language: ka, ki, ku, ke, ko; sa, shi, su, se, so; ta, shi, tsu, te, to; na, ni, nu, ne, no; ha, hi, fu, he, ho; ma, mi, mu, me, mo; ya, yu, yo; ra, ri, ru, re, ro; wa, wi, we, wo; -n. Note that "wi" and "we" have fallen out of use in popular Japanese, and tend to be used more in the countryside and in formal occasions.

There are also some newer syllables that have come into use, primarily because of Westernization and also due to Chinese and Korean cultural acceptance and integration: ye; va, vi, vu, ve, vo; she; je; che; ti, tu; di, du; fa, fi, fe, and a few others. Note, however, that it's kind of a crapshoot as to how well people will recognize or understand these syllables.

There are three alphabets in Japanese; Katakana and Hiragana, which each have 47 characters (katakana being simpler and finding more use in modern writing, hiragana being more artistic and found more in traditional writing), and then Kanji, which is based on traditional Chinese, and has over a thousand characters. Needless to say, Kanji is one of the biggest hurdles to getting along in Japan... it sure will be for me :( Good thing I'm a very visual person.