Postby mmmason8967 » October 8th, 2012 7:29 pm
Yes, I'll try to explain how it works:-
ラ ra
ー symbol that means the preceding vowel (in this case 'a') should be held twice as long
ドゥ combination pronounced as 'du'; it's made up of ド (do) and a small-size ウ (u).
ラ ra
イ i
チャ combination pronounced as 'cha', made of チ (chi) and a small-size ヤ (ya).
The combinations are written as a normal-size kana followed by a small-size kana, so it's ドゥ, not ドウ, and it's チャ, not チヤ. Although they're made of two kana, these combinations are pronounced as a single syllable, so although each name looks like four syllables, there's actually only three in each one.
The ドゥ combination is a special one used for western words and names. The first character is 'to' and the two little marks indicate that it's voiced, meaning that it changes from 'to' to 'do'. This applies to all the 't' characters: the two marks indicated that the 't' sound is replaced by a 'd' sound. The 't' characters are ta, ti, tu, te and to but as you probably already know, 'ti' is pronounced 'chi' and 'tu' is pronounced 'tsu'. The voiced version of the 'tsu' character pronounced 'zu' and not 'du' as you might expect, so the combination ドゥ is used to represent the 'du' sound in western words and names.
マイケル