Customer Reviews

Best Chinese Names

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This is a great book and resource excellent names and background. I am a non-native Chinese teacher and it helped me create names for my classes. The students and I both loved it!

I personally think this book is essential, not just for someone naming a child, but for any English speaker who is studying Chinese and wants to understand Chinese names. Since there is no "Look Inside!" option for this book, and the other reviewer was so disappointed because they were looking specifically for Cantonese, I feel obligated to write a review explaining what this book contains.

First of all, this book is written for native English speakers who also speak and have basic literacy in Chinese. This is key. You need to be familiar with simplified Chinese characters already for this book to really be useful to you. It's written in VERY CLEAR, eloquent English, and uses the pinyin phonetic system to show the pronunciation of Chinese characters. The authors have gone to great lengths to make sure that the pinyin accompanies every character, but there is one list of plants, flowers, and trees on pp. 46-48 that does not include pinyin. However, like I said, if you have studied Chinese characters, you know how to use a Chinese dictionary and you should have no problem looking up these words.

(I must point out that if you are a Cantonese/other Chinese language speaker and are looking for name ideas, this book could still come in handy. You'd just need to know how to read simplified characters and know their pronunciations in Cantonese/any other Chinese language. I don't know how the phonetic aspect of the names would come out for you, but in terms of significance the names should transcend languages.)

Secondly, this book is organized WELL. In Part 1, the author starts off by laying down three basic rules for choosing a good name. A name should be pleasant to hear (sound), be easy to remember (writing and rarity of characters), and have a good meaning (semantics and connotation). This in itself for me is eye-opening; I have always heard native Chinese speakers say, "Oh, that's a good name!" and I had NO way of understanding how they came to that conclusion. NOW I DO.

In Part 2, the author gets down to the complexity of choosing a Chinese name that always intimidated me when I heard the Chinese side of family talking about names. There are so many methods of naming, I am not going to list them here. The author lists some very helpful methods, and what must be considered for each one. NOTE: One thing that IS missing from this book that I know my family uses is a stroke count, i.e. a tally of how many strokes there are total in a full name. That might be part of a separate Chinese numerology book somewhere, so I guess I still have to go looking for that.

Part 3 is a guide to male names, and Part 4 is a guide to female names. These sections include VERY helpful lists of characters that can be combined to make good names. There are example names, too, so if you really don't feel knowledgeable enough to put together some characters to make a good name, you can choose one from the lists. There are TONS of names to choose from.

Part 5 is a list of Chinese names that are equivalent to English names. This section is not extensive, but fun for anyone considering giving their kid a Chinese name that sounds like their English name, or for anyone who's ever been asked, "What would my name be in Chinese?" by an inquisitive child who doesn't understand the complex differences between the English and Chinese writing systems.

Part 6, the final part, is a reference index that includes what I am assuming is the complete list of Chinese surnames and some lists of individual characters as well as idioms that can be used to make names.

All in all, I think this is an extremely useful book and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has at least a basic understanding of simplified Chinese characters.

I bought this book to try to find a Chinese name for my baby. My husband is Chinese and speaks Cantonese, but this book is Mandarin Chinese so he couldn't read much of it. Don't buy this unless you can read (and speak) Mandarin Chinese or it will be much too difficult to understand.