In case you’re curious
About Chinese names…
There are usually 2 ~ 4 characters in a Chinese name, with 3-character names being the most common ones (84.3%).
Chinese family names (姓; pinyin: xìng) are written before the given name and are typically taken from fathers (although there is a movement for babies to take mothers’ family names in recent years). Around 2,000 Chinese family names are currently in use, but only a small portion is used by the majority; in fact, the top 100 family names would cover ~87% of the population. Among them, Wang 王 and Li(or Lee) 李 are two of the most common ones, each shared by over 100 million people in China (2019). Most Chinese family names have only one character; however, about 20 double-character family names have survived into modern times, including 司马 (Si’ma), 诸葛 (Zhu’ge), and 欧阳 (Ou’yang, O'Young or O Yang).
Chinese given names (名; pinyin: míng): In contrast to the relative paucity of the family names, given names can theoretically include any of the 100k characters in Chinese with almost any meaning. There isn’t a list of first names such as Amy, Lucas, Sofia, Marianna to choose from. Rather, each first name is unique and carries the wishes of parents to their children. In contrast to western naming traditions, it is considered disrespectful to name a child after an older or deceased family member. It’s also believed that taking the names of celebrities or famous historical figures is both uncreative and disadvantageous for the child's fortune. Given names are chosen based on a range of factors, including most importantly meaning, as well as sound and tonal qualities that would form a nice flow when read together with the family name.
Introducing oneself and addressing others (名字; pinyin: míng zi): When you introduce yourself or learn about people’s names, you will most likely introduce the full name. Since the family name goes before the first name in Chinese, when you forget about other names or have met someone very briefly, it is way more likely for you to remember their family name, and blanking out on their first name. Different than name addressing tradition in the English world, first names are rarely used on their own. Family names are more frequently used as it is the proper way to show respect. Addressing the elderly (whether the person is your family or a stranger), educators, and superiors in companies with their full names is considered disrespectful. Instead, a combination of an honorific title (like Teacher) and their family name, or family name plus Mr./Mrs. should be used. Therefore remembering people’s family names is much more useful than their first names if you are new to the Chinese language but deal with many Chinese people in your life. Since there are usually only 3 characters in a name, Chinese full names are easier to remember for Chinese speakers than English full names to English speakers. You may have known someone for long but never paid much attention to the exact spelling of their family name. With Chinese names, you will definitely know.
Some (maybe a lot) info about the Chinese language…
Writing: You probably heard or said it yourself, Chinese is a random drawing, which is completely understandable. The writing system is actually not random at all: basic strokes and common radicals compose each character. You cannot invent your own characters. The composition and writing of each character is fixed.
Strokes are the different shapes of lines in a character ---- not only are they very fixed in the direction they go and the dimensions, but there is also a certain order to write each character. Just think of strokes in Chinese as letters in English ---- they are building blocks of characters. Only that instead of standing side by side to each other like letters, they stack up or cross each other in very specific ways; instead of representing the phonetics, they cannot be used to spell out a character, for that Chinese characters have nothing to do with their pronunciation. Strokes are meaningless when standalone, and there are only 36 of them. (Not intimidating at all right?)
Radicals are like prefixes in English ---- they are in many words and have a certain meaning. For example, a word like “unostentatious” drops in some article, if you can’t remember or have no idea what it means, you know for sure it is the opposite of “ostentatious” because of the un- prefix. Radicals function just like that. They appear at the fixated position in characters and give you a hint of the very general meaning. Radicals, in addition to pinyin, are two major ways to look up characters in a paper dictionary.
Fun practice: Can you spot the radical (a recurring part at a fixed position) in these characters?
花，草，芳，苹，苗，葡，菊
Answer: Did you find it? It’s 艹, a common radical for plants. All these characters are indeed a kind of plant or some nature-related things —— 花 (flower)，草(grass)，芳(natural fragrance)，苹(apple)，苗(seedlings of cereal crop)，葡(grape)，菊(Chrysanthemum). Because 艹 is always positioned on the top, all characters (not limited to the ones shown here) containing this radical 艹 are of a top-bottom structure.
Reading: Not apparent to all, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet, which means the writing is separate from the sound. In an alphabetical language like English, once you know the 26 letters and some rules, you can read out a lot of words right without knowing what they mean. Chinese, on the other hand, does not have that convenience. Therefore, one needs to learn character by character and treat them as all independent letters (but each letter has a meaning, see more in the next section). The good news is, all Chinese characters are of one syllable, like car, big, see, book, chew in English. So there are no spelling rules like the silent “t” in “listen“ or phonetic rules like ph = /f/ in “phone” to bug you.
Chinese romanization (pinyin): The romanization of Chinese, called the pinyin system, is to use the Latin alphabet to represent Chinese pronunciation. The letters only represent the sound of Chinese, but not the tone or the meaning. A tone mark is added on top of letters to indicate the tone. Here is a chart of all pinyin in Mandarin Chinese. Every sound you make in speaking mandarin Chinese can be found here.
Use of pinyin: There are 3 major uses for pinyin: typing, learning, and transliteration of Chinese names.
Typing: Many have wondered how big the keyboard must be to type Chinese. This is where pinyin becomes extremely convenient. To type Chinese, you need exactly the same QWERTY keyboard you have for English. Since many characters share the same pronunciation, by typing out the pinyin (without the tone), all characters with that pronunciation ranked by frequency will show up on the screen. Then you select the one you intend to type. Pinyin is the most widely used and easiest way of typing in Chinese. However, there are several other options out there that people use.
Learning new characters: Pre-schoolers and first-graders use pinyin a lot at school. Since kids have limited vocabularies and only know how to write some characters compared to adults, pinyin is used as a placeholder when they don’t know how to write. Adults would use pinyin too when they blank out on words.
Spell Chinese names in English: You’ve probably seen some Chinese names like Daiyu Lin, Jinlian Pan, Yingying Cui, Liniang Du. Pinyin is the official transcription of Chinese names into English (in mainland China). Now that you know each Chinese character has pronunciation and a tone, you are probably thinking, where did the tone go? Well, when Chinese names are written in English, tones are simply ignored. So if you meet two people whose names are both Shuoyu Zhang, they may have completely different names in Chinese, but in English, they look the same because the pinyin of their names is the same. Ask Chinese people to write their names out in Chinese next time you see one, and you will understand the logic more intuitively and be able to explain it to other people.
Character separation: This may be a shocker, but Chinese doesn’t have spacing (ahhhhh how can it be!). But how come people can read and write perfectly well and not even think about the need for spacing? That’s because characters are very distinct from each other. Each Chinese character has an invisible square around it. By counting the number of squares you see in a sentence, you can know how many characters there are. Since each character is a complete entity, they are already separated from each other and thus there is no need for spacing. If you decide to learn Chinese, at the elementary level there may be spacing in your textbooks for easier interpretation.
Fun practice: Can you count the number of characters in this sentence?
Take a breath, have some patience, and you may start counting squares.
今晚我准备去公园里遛狗。
Answer: 11. It means “Tonight I’m going to walk my dog in the park”.
Other fun facts about Chinese for those champs who have read this far…
Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese: Simplified and traditional Chinese both only refer to writing, not speaking. Traditional Chinese looks more complex and has more strokes, whereas simplified Chinese, as its name suggests, is less complex and has fewer strokes. Traditional Chinese has existed for thousands of years, whereas simplified Chinese was created and organized in the early to the mid-20th century in China to promote literacy. Mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore use simplified Chinese, whereas places like Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and most overseas Chinese communities (like that Chinatown near you) use traditional Chinese.
Chinese dialects: Chinese has a gazillion dialects, the most prominent one being Cantonese (Some argue that Cantonese is so distinct from Mandarin that it should be labeled as a language instead of a dialect of Chinese). Mandarin (based mostly on Beijing dialect) is promoted in mainland China as the standard so people from all places could communicate with each other. Although some dialects are not too different from mandarin in speaking, many dialects are actually unintelligible to Chinese themselves. The most ‘notorious’ ones include Fuzhou dialect, Minnan dialect, Wenzhou dialect, Chaoshan dialect, Hakka, and Shanxi dialect. There are many YouTube videos on each of these Chinese dialects. Compare them with videos in Mandarin Chinese and you will relate to the linguistic frustration and confusion of Chinese speakers when they listen to other Chinese speak in their own dialects.