Kenji in Korean

Why Korean spells it 겐지

Korean writes foreign names by sound, not letter by letter. There is no silent letter and no way to write a consonant with nothing after it, so an English name usually gains or loses a beat on the way in — that is why Kenji becomes 2 blocks.

This spelling is the conventional one — the form a Korean would write on a delivery slip or a name tag without thinking about it. There are other ways to approximate the same sounds, and you will occasionally see them, but this is the one that reads as normal rather than as a foreigner spelling their own name phonetically.

If it is going on your skin, check it with a Korean speaker first. You can ask here — a person in Seoul answers, not a machine.

Where 겐지 goes in real life

Korean names run surname first, given name second, with no space between them — 김민준 is the Kim family’s Min-jun, not a first name called Kim. Yours is a foreign name, so it keeps its own order and stays as it sounds: 겐지 is simply Kenji.

Korean surnames are one block and given names are usually two, so most Korean names are three blocks long. 겐지 is 2 — shorter than the local norm, which is fine.

To address you politely, a Korean adds 씨 (-ssi) after the name: 겐지씨. Note that this goes after a given name or a full name — attaching it to someone’s surname alone (김 씨) sounds distant or slightly down-the-nose, which is a common thing to get wrong in the other direction.

Where length starts to matter is cafés. Starbucks Korea will call your name out instead of a number if you register a nickname in the app, but the nickname has to be a Korean noun of six characters or fewer, and 겐지 fits. Everywhere else you are handed a buzzer and none of this comes up.