Miku-chan and Sefu-sensei

This is a picture one of my preschool students, Miku-chan, made for me in class today.  The Japanese hiragana reads “Miku-to-Sefu” or “Miku and Seth.”  My name can either be written as せす (se-su) or せふ (se-fu) using hiragana.  However, foreign words and names are usually written using katakana characters.  Both are phonetic representations of all the sounds in the verbal Japanese language and function similarly to our own Roman phonetic alphabet.  Young children learn hiragana first so that they can read and write effectively while working to master the 2,000 kanji (Chinese characters) used in everyday Japanese.  Text is written using a combination of the three because the language has no spaces or punctuation.  Individual words can only be distinguished by a change in character type.  Adults and older children will usually write my name as セス(se-su) in katakana.