Baby Name: Qiaoping

Yesterday’s post had to do with Chinese baby names, and Chinese New Year is coming up this weekend, so I thought today would be the perfect day to talk about how to pronounce Chinese names.

If you’re totally unfamiliar with Chinese names, here are the two biggest tips I can give you:

• In Chinese, the letter Q sounds a lot like “ch.”
• In Chinese, the letter X sounds a lot like “sh.”

Of course those aren’t the exact sounds — the Chinese Q and X don’t have equivalent sounds in English — but “ch” and “sh” are close. Wikipedia’s explanation, on the pinyin page, is a bit better:

• Q is like the sound in the middle of “punch yourself.”
• X is like the sound in the middle of “push yourself.”

To hear the exact sounds of Q and X, listen to a few of the audio files at the Mandarin Chinese Phonetics Table.

Now let’s try some names.

One of yesterday’s names was the female name Qinglan. Because Q sounds like “ch,” the pronunciation is similar to ching lan. (The a-sound in the second syllable is like the a-sound in “father.”)

None of yesterday’s names had a X, so let’s use Xiaolan. (This happens to be the Chinese name of Elaine Chao, 24th U.S. Secretary of Labor.) The X sounds like “sh” or “shy,” so the pronunciation is shyau lan.

Here are a few more Chinese names featuring the letters Q and X. The pinyin transcriptions are followed by my own approximate phonetic pronunciations, in italics. (If you’re a Mandarin speaker and can suggest more accurate pronunciations, I’d appreciate it!)

What other Chinese names do you have a hard time pronouncing?

Image: Adapted from China by M M under CC BY-SA 2.0.