How to learn how to write your name in japanese
How I did it: I was taking Japanese anyway, and the first thing we did was learn hiragana and katakana, the phonetic writing systems. Hiragana is used for native words and katakana is used for foreign words, including names, or emphasis. There are only 44 written phonemes from 'a' to 'n', so it really doesn't take long to become familiar with them.
Then we had to learn how words are 'Japanized' to fit their pronunciation scheme. Japanese has no 'si' or 'ti' sounds (they become 'shi' and 'chi' respectively), and no consonant clusters, so vowels have to be inserted between the consonants. There is no 'v' sound either (this becomes something like 'bui' instead depending on the sound after it). So a name like Steve becomes more like "suchiibu" when it is written in Japanese.
Lessons & tips: We covered them over the course of a few weeks in class, but with a bit of study and practice, they could all be learned in a day or two.
Learning katakana after learning hiragana is even easier than that because there are exactly the same phonemes, and some of them for the same sounds are very similar, such as for 'ka'.
Resources: Any beginning Japanese book will go through the hiragana and katakana near the beginning if it isn't a book focused exclusively on conversation.
