My Chinese Name
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Zheng(3) serious, solemn, earnest.
In present Chinese the single character is only used as
surname.
"Zheng" is the official romanized form, called Pinyin, of
my Chinese surname. However, because I left China in 1980,
when the standard wasn't widely used yet, my parents got
stuck with "Cheng" instead.
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Sen(1) 1. full of trees 2. dark, gloomy.
Combined with
[lin (2)] it means forest.
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Chinese Names in General
Chinese names are written in an order opposite to the western
way, i.e. first comes the family name (surname) and then the
personal name (given name).
There is a consistent Chinese philosophy to put bigger
entities first. Other examples are the way addresses and
dates are written:
- country, city, street, name and
- year, month, day
Tradition has it that surnames usually consist of a single
character (very seldom of two), whereas personal names are
either one or two characters. Every Chinese character has
its own meaning and is pronounced as one syllable only
(see online Chinese
dictionaries).
So that means that Chinese names usually have 2- 3
syllables only, which makes it very hard to "translate"
western names into Chinese, as they are mostly longer than
3 syllables. Here is a nice tool that tries
to find a decent
Chinese name.
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